The Opening

We've been busy "Sharpening the Saw" and a bit remiss on the newsletter front, so *read down at the bottom* for a valued opportunity that might be of interest.

Business has been good the first half of this year and we've been busy, particularly in the commercial / industrial sector. In commercial finance, one customer recently mentioned they beating their benchmark when building their portfolios using forecasts from our EMS III software, and fund traders are reporting they are also doing well. Individual traders' use of Dakota and Profit remains strong and some very nice out-of-sample equity curves are being sent to me, including one just yesterday from Italy. It was derived from some of James Slack-Smith's popular Dakota add-ins found over at Adaptive Trading Systems. Check 'em out. I can see signals from many successful Dakota EOD systems being "pumped" into the community "Super Swarm" and that's a good thing.

In The Labs, work on our Intellect 3.0 capabilities continue, including support for reasonably high-speed real-time data streams. While not fast enough for sub-atomic particle accelerators, it works well for bid/ask quotes. Some industrial customers have been running the robust "Intellect 3.0 Server" for about 6 months now, non-stop, 24/7. "Robust" like the Energizer Bunny, it just keeps going, plowing through various computer system challenges, like server reboots, network outages, database downtimes, etc. to keep delivering "the goods" (results). Profit 8 is based upon this commercial architecture and later so will Dakota. Some lab investment is also being direct towards building applications using Microsoft's WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) which to a trader is pretty meaningless... except that software can be more graphically interesting and informative and WPF off-loads some of the user interface work onto your graphics card, freeing up your main CPU cycles for doing other computational magic.

Windows 7 is the first 64 bit operating system we intend to support, although some customers are already running Dakota EOD on Vista64 as well as the Windows 7 "Release Candidate". I've given Microsoft senior management and some of their team leaders some guidance to help Windows 7 be "a keeper". They've incorporated the suggestions, and so I hope it is.

And thus we sprint forward into a bright future.

Carl Cook
President and Chief Technical Officer

Announcements

BioComp Profit 8.0.8 Update
BioComp Profit 8.0.8 is now available. Profit 8 users should please head to the forums for release information and to download. For prospective customers, there is Profit 8 information here: Profit 8.0 Info >>

BioComp Dakota 2.1.47 Update
BioComp Dakota 2.1.47 is now available. Dakota end-of-day users should please head to the forums for release information and to download. For prospective customers, you can find Dakota (End of Day) information here: Dakota Info >>

The Opportunity

Sitting This Out? Then Sharpen the Saw
If you are sitting out the current market conditions I might suggest that this is the best time to get, learn and master a new tool like Dakota. Stephen Covey calls the 7th and final habit of highly effective people, "Sharpen the Saw", which means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have--you. It means self-renewal, to prepare and improve yourself for action during a quiet times.

A great place to start is the end-of-day Dakota, even if you are an intraday trader. Invest this time into learning a new technology so when you are ready to put your toe back into the waters, you are equipt and ready, this time with valuable new insights from new technologies.

In the spirit of Covey's motivational insights and wisdom, on any Dakota EOD order or upgrade through midnight July 15th, if you put in the order comments section "Sharpen the Saw", we'll give you a 15% reduction.