You may not realize that the price of our Swarm Technology trading tool, BioComp Dakota, is set by the users. I think this is a fairly novel idea. It keeps Dakota's pricing anchored in the reality of the value to the user. It doesn't matter how great we think the product is, it's what YOU think. From time to time we send out an email survey asking users at what price is Dakota End-of-Day "Standard" too cheap and also too expensive. We get 2 distributions of prices. The true value is at the intersection of those distributions; just right... not too cheap and not too expensive.

Dakota End-of-Day "Standard" is currently priced at $859. The "optimal" price came back from the users at $1,011.49.

So, guess what... the price is going up, and very soon. So, if you are interested in getting Dakota or upgrading, you might consider doing it right now... You can, here >>

We also asked users if they were actively trading using Dakota. We were pleasantly surprised that 79.4% of the respondents said "Yes".

To our surprise, we also received many compliments from the respondents, including;

"First, let me say that there is "no price" for a software like Dakota. It is fantastic and so it's hard to price it."

"the results are excellent"

"There is real value in Dakota"

"Dakota is very attractive because it has a shorter learning curve"

"Are we using it? , Yes, with good results."

"The Dakota models are very robust"

"Dakota is **NOT** a toy"

"the actual prices are too cheap (both eod and real time)"...

Got Dakota?
Get Yours here >>

P.S.: Dakota users can get 1/2 off your 1st futures data orders from Pinnacle... ask us how!

I was having an email conversation with a Profit 7 user recently about the advantages of BioComp Profit 8 over Profit 7. Here are a few of the items that came to mind. Note, these items are somewhat technical and will mostly make sense if you are already a Profit user:

In many ways, Profit 8 is substantially ahead of Profit 7.  Not just the depth of capabilities behind the scenes because it is based on our broad-reaching commercial/industrial Intellect 3.0 "engine", but because of Profit 8's...

- Ease of use.  Getting data into Profit 8 is much easier. Just double-click a security. Also, text files are easier: Profit 8 can "map" a whole folder of text files at once.

- Profit 8 has more indicator functions than 7 and in Profit 8 they are a linked chain of temporal real-time-enabled task objects and also in Profit 8 you can change an indicator's parameters after it is applied... just click and change it. Everything just recomputes.

- Profit 8's indicator optimization is better designed with an internal set of objects with optimizable items (indicators in this case), a performance metric object and an optimizer object, all "snap together" in a blink. The architecture enables swapping out any of those "parts" with something else.

- The "Chart it" function is much better in Profit 8.

- Equity calculations in Profit 7 are "baked in".  They are all add-ins in 8, enabling a wide variety of ways to look at equity performance and allowing people to create their own.

- Stops in Profit 8 are much better. They not only give full signal control (long, short, out or "do nothing" each bar, a wanted feature in Profit since 1997, but they are add-ins too.

- In Profit 7, license control is by exchanging codes on every computer move or by using a "dongle".  In 8, just check-in/check-out a User ID over the internet, like Dakota.

- In Profit 8 you can partition data for modeling by % of rows, or absolute rows, either sequentially or randomly, or between specific days, in any order (you can even model the most recent data and evaluate and select models based on data many years ago (if you want).

- In Profit 7, you had to somehow keep track of "Out of Sample" dates.  Profit 8 does it for you.

- In Profit 7, the Profit API talks to the application window.  In Profit 8, it's a Microsoft .NET namespace in our Intellect 3.0 assembly. (true cyber-nerds know what I'm saying)

- In Profit 7, you could only open one system at a time.  In 8, you are limited only by computer resources, not only to open, but do work too! (work with System A while System B is building models).

- In Profit 7, most everything is single threaded, meaning you have to wait.  In 8 most everything is asynchronous multi-threaded and you can do many things at once and it all runs smoothly, on only one CPU or many.

- In Profit 7, model performance statistics, the basis upon which models are created, are "baked in".  In Profit 8, they are an add in.

- In Profit 8, you can associate any performance metric the equity engine calculates and sort, view, delete models in many ways.

Those are just a few to start.

Now is the time to jump on the Profit pre-release.

Pre-Ordering Available:
New Licenses >>
Upgrades >>
Workshops >>

I recently discovered with Profit 8 that if you are trading the Close of the same day (get your data, then get your signals from Profit, then trade after hours) that by counter-trading the equity curves of the individual models to create a final signal, you can make some nice systems very easily. Maybe too easy... The equity curves are quite straight.

"Counter trading the equity curves" means that in Profit 8 you have a collection of models and by "merging" those models' signals to create a new signal based on fading their equity performance, using a piece of logic within a "Model Merge Add-In" provided to Profit 8 users, you can draw some nice straight upward sloping equity curves (gains in your account over time).

Here is a screenshot of a chart...

The bottom plot is hypothetical account equity (Equity Curve). The last 25%, on the right side, is completely "out of sample", true, but still hypothetical, trading performance.

Pretty nice. No optimization on that.