Karakhorum
Ventures, Inc.
Software Development ¨ Consulting ¨ Troubleshooting
Contents
The Client Need
In
today’s competitive environment existing development staff within companies are
typically working against tight deadlines and have no “slack” to pursue small
but desirable projects which arise from time to time. Because many great ideas are forgotten if not acted upon quickly
this results in potentially numerous missed opportunities for business success.
For
individuals who own their own small business the problem is that they typically
do not have the resources to hire a salaried programming staff.
Karakhorum
Ventures' answer to these dilemmas is to develop ongoing relationships with our
clients to understand their business needs. With an established relationship we
can be effective in helping with short-term or temporary projects as needs
arise.
By
providing assistance only when it is needed we help our clients manage their
development expenses while enabling them to implement their ideas while they
are “hot.”
In
addition to software development we are also available to assist with
trouble-shooting projects and existing systems which are not performing to
expectations.
About Us
Karakhorum
Ventures was founded by Brendan B. Boerner, a highly regarded software engineer
and project manager formerly with Novell, Inc.
and Pervasive Software, Inc.
Mr.
Boerner believes that three crucial issues impede successful software development
efforts:
·
Poor communication.
·
Poor
understanding of the problem to be solved.
·
Less than
robust development methodologies.
To
address these deficiencies Mr. Boerner’s development philosophy mirrors his
general life philosophy:
·
Ongoing and clear communication with clients to ensure that
requirements, both stated and implicit, are understood.
·
Defer coding until the problem is properly understood. While this produces the perception that
progress is not being made, this approach ultimately results in on-time product
deliverable that meets the client’s expectations and requires less re-work than
a “get coding now” approach.
·
Choosing a development methodology that is compatible with the
specific project. While an SEI (Software Engineering
Institute) CMM (Capability Maturity Model) approach may be required for
designing large mission-critical systems such as Space Shuttle systems, it is
generally overkill for smaller projects.
Mr. Boerner’s favored approach for most client projects is to use an
iterative, rapid-prototyping approach similar to Extreme Programming. Using this approach the client receives
frequent updates of project deliverables to review and provide feedback. Such feedback results in reduced latency to
address client concerns and helps to ensure that the final deliverable meets
the client’s expectations.
Recent Projects
- Design and
implement a data collection and analysis platform.
- Design and
implement connections between client’s proprietary trading system and
Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Barclays FX quote and trade
interfaces.
- Design and
implement a single-sided market options trading system.
- Option
positions hedged with stock positions.
- Stream
data using Reuters Plus.
- Trade
using FIX (RediFIX / QuickFIX).
- Requirements
included supporting hundreds of option / stock pairs.
- Design and
implement a position management system for TradeStation (2000i / v7).
- Quote /
Trade execution via Interactive
Broker’s TWSAPI.
- Architecture
included EasyLanguage code, a TradeStation Extension DLL and a User
Interface written in Visual C++, MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes).
- A solution
to allow a client to access Pinnacle data in TradeStation v6. This required creating:
- A TradeStation External DLL to access
the data stored in .csv (Comma Separated Value) format.
- EasyLanguage
code to interface to the DLL.
- A solution
to allow a client to access data from a non-TradeStation program in TradeStation 2000i. This required creating:
- A Win32
GUI program to allow the client to specify needed settings.
- A TradeStation External DLL to
access the data stored in Microsoft Access.
- EasyLanguage
code to interface to the DLL.
- Design and
implement a stock scalping system.
- Capture
and save broker’s ‘raw’ tick data stream.
- Model and
create trading system using captured data.
- Create
Position Management and Order Execution Systems.
- Partial
re-implementation of an existing spread trading system using Visual C++,
MFC and ADO (Microsoft Active Data Objects). The client had coded an existing system using the following
technologies:
- Excel was
used to capture quotes using Spear, Leeds & Kellogg’s REDIPlus. The spreadsheet was linked to an
Access table.
- Access (instance #1) used the quote data to check
positions and open & close positions.
- Access (instance #2) was the user-interface to the
system.
- Requirements
for the re-designed system were to support processing high-volume
(hundreds of security streams) real-time tick data and mid-volume (tens
of orders per second) order execution while maintaining acceptable user
response.
As it was determined that Excel alone was
typically consuming 25% CPU utilization (on a 700Mhz Pentium running Windows NT
4.0) the client desired a phased implementation beginning with the replacement
of Excel for quote capturing.
A quote capture module was implemented in
C++ connecting to REDIPlus via an
ActiveX interface. On initial
implementation CPU utilization by the quote capture module dropped to approx.
5%. With the new module in-place system
performance (measured by the # of positions checked per second) increased by
300%. Further improvements increased
performance by approx. 400%.
- Ported
TrenAlyzer (a proprietary non-linear time series trend detector) to TradeStation 2000i.
- Contributed
multi-appender support for Open Source log4cpp.
- Created tool
using Visual C++ and MFC to identify and prepare for analysis “dynamic
spreads.”
- Created
polynomial curve fitting routine and integrated as external Dynamic Link
Library (DLL) into MetaStock Pro and TradeStation 2000i supporting
user specified length to fit and polynomial order.
- Developed
Java utilities to gather and pre-process end-of-day and intra-day data,
load the data into an ODBC database, generate Fourier transforms using it,
and other post-processing.
- Statistically
analyzed effects of Broker Recommendation change, Consumer Price Index
(CPI), and Producer Price Index (PPI) to determine if a predictable and
tradable reaction follows.
- Researched
Data Mining, including Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and tools such as
NeuroDimension’s Trading
Solutions and WEKA.
Competencies
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES / APIS
|
C/C++ |
Java
(command-line utilities) |
Visual
Basic for Access/Excel |
Intel
80x86 Assembler |
|
Win32,
Win16 |
Novell
NetWare (Client and NLM) |
|
|
|
Microsoft
Component Object Model (COM) |
Microsoft
Foundation Classes (MFC) |
Microsoft
Active Data Objects (ADO) |
ODBC/JDBC |
|
Barclays
Capital FX Trading System |
Deutsche
Bank B2B Integration API |
Goldman
Sachs Foreign Exchange Transaction Protocol |
UBS
Fx2B |
|
Financial
Information eXchange (FIX) Protocol |
RediFIX
(server only) |
Goldman Sachs REDIPlus |
|
|
Interactive Broker’s TWSAPI
(SocketClient) |
Assent
Brokerage Hammer Protocol |
||
|
OmegaResearch
TradeStation 2000i / TradeStation
Technologies TradeStation v7 DevKit (including EasyLanguage /
Extension DLLs) |
Equis
MetaStock Pro MSX (External Function) DevKit |
|
|
Software
|
Office 2000 (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint) |
Visual C++ / Watcom C++ |
|
Pervasive.SQL |
Lex/Yacc |
|
Trading Solutions |
WEKA |
|
SoftICE for DOS, Win32 |
DOS/4G |
|
Remote NLM (NetWare Loadable Module) Debugging |
NetWare
Internal Debugger |
Operating
Systems
|
Windows NT/2000 / XP |
NetWare 3.x, 4.x |
|
Linux/Solaris |
Windows 95/98 |
|
Windows 3.1 |
DOS |
Contact
We appreciate the opportunity to present our offerings to you
and would like to discuss with you how we can best meet your software
development needs. Please feel free to
contact us at:
Brendan B. Boerner
512.257.8362
Thank
you and have a great day!