Σ1

Faster Software is Greener Software Simply put, when one software product is more efficient than another, it runs faster and takes less time to solve the same problem.  The less time software takes to run, the less power is consumed. By way of illustration, consider the efficiency of a steam ship going from New York [...]

Most of the reading I have done regarding angel investing suggests that finding the right “match” is a critical part of the process.  This process is not just about a business plan and a product, it is also about people and personalities. Let me attempt to give some insight into my entrepreneurial personality.  I have been working [...]

Let me take you back to grad school for a few moments, or perhaps your college undergrad. If you’ve studied much finance, you’ve surely studied beta in the context of modern portfolio theory (MPT) and the Capital-Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). If you are a quant like me, you may have been impressed with the elegance [...]

The first business plan I wrote was a basic outline for a small residential real-estate venture.  It detailed the property, the company equity in the property, re-curing expenses, estimated value of the property, competitive rental market data and expected cash flow.  This simple, one-page, business plan helped secure a $10,000 private loan, that has hence [...]

Building superior investment portfolios is what money managers are paid to do. As a fund manager, I wanted software to help me build superior, positive-alpha portfolios. Not finding software that did anything like I wanted, I decided to write my own. When I build or modify a portfolio I start with investment ideas. Ideas like [...]

A Baseball Analogy Imagine you’re the general manager of a Major League ball club.  Your primary job is to construct (and maintain) a team of players  that will win lots of games, while keeping the total player payroll as low as possible.  When considering a hypothetical roster a baseball GM has two primary objectives in [...]

Personally the easiest part of the financial software business is software development.  I have been involved with sales before and feel reasonably confident about this aspect of the business.  The primary challenge for me is marketing. Sales is a face-to-face process.  Software development is either a solo process or a collaborative process usually involving a [...]

Software development seems to inevitably take longer than scheduled.  I thought I’d have a working alpha model by “Day 4″, but it took me until “Day 7″.  Happily, yesterday my program produced its first algorithmically-generated portfolios.  These portfolios were generated from a small “universe” of stocks optimized using simple heuristics.  To test my new algorithm, [...]

Portfolio Software: Plain English Yesterday I wrote an early version of financial software to help users improve their investing portfolios.  This software has the ability to solve financial problems in a very different way than taught in graduate-level finance classes.   Rather than relying solely on a type of mathematics called statistic analysis, Sigma1 software [...]