Glimpse of the investment training program of the future.

Right now am pretty hard at work trying to imagine how my program will look like in the future.

I do know that I have a very successful collaboration with Stocks Cafe and my challenge moving forward is to scale this form of collaboration across the industry with like-minded individuals - folks like Dr Wealth's Alvin Chow and Stocks Cafe's Evan Koh.

The folks who work well with me have a few common traits: a strong engineering/computing background, a strong desire to build solid products that consistently deliver more value than it's cost. While marketing an UX is not the strongest suit of folks I partner with - I do constantly get angst from my more marketing-oriented friends about the usability of some products I support, I believe that focusing on substance will always mean more profits long term and a comfortable growth rate. Because let's face it, we're in the business of delivering results.

I am currently working with Ivann Fok of pyinvesting.com in building backtesting tools to provide the means for local retail investors to backtest fundamental strategies. You can follow the link to get a free subscription and even access a simple video I created here where I show my students how to use the tool.

A screenshot of pyinvesting.com is as follows:

The back-end program logic is starting to shape up really well and I am beginning to able to get some of the simpler backtesting to work on my next class without burning hours queuing for a Bloomberg terminal in the libraries. Our challenge is to simplify the UI to improve on usability. Until then, I will be creating video tutorials for my students to use the tools in a way that is consistent with what is taught in my program.

I expect to have a close collaboration with Ivann over the next few months and I even invited him to be a guest student for my next ERM run which is this weekend. If you want to attend a course to run elbows with an ex-quant and developer, now's your chance to do this. The last preview for this weekend's course is tomorrow. 

Naturally, I take my collaborations with my partners seriously and I have to imagine how I would want a backtesting tool to look like on the web to collaborate with partners better in the future. We're brainstorming ways to simplify the webpage UI and the best way to do it is to build alternatives and share the code. 

I have been transferring my own Python code using Streamlit to build a personal web-app tool to analyse stocks and build lecture slides for future ERM course runs. This exposes me to the newer UI components that can be used to improve the appearance of web-based investment tools. My struggle now is to use unfamiliar tools like Docker to push these web-apps to be hosted in the cloud, so my learning curve is kinda steep as well. Hope by September 2020,  I will be demonstrating my training concepts using web-apps that I write myself. 

In the world of investment training, I think a new battleground will open for bespoke investing tools to supplement lecture notes on how to invest. My final aim is to have ERM students have a ecosystem of affordable investment tools to give the quants in the market a run for their money. They've got expensive tools like Bloomberg but I have an army of trained amateurs to back me up in this fight. 

Future tools look like this:

• Tools for portfolio management and dividends tracking to be done on Stocks Cafe
• Tools for backtesting and stock selection via pyinvesting.com
• A set of free and bespoke tools that utilise deep learning, clustering readily accessible by ERM students to do deep exploration to join my community in crowdsourcing investment ideas that I will write.