In Investment Studio, portfolios are not an afterthought; they are the starting point. Conceptually, all your investments are part of a tree structure with portfolios at the root. Each portfolio contains assets; each asset contains transactions and is linked to a quote history. Investment Studio's user interface is organized in views which reflect this natural structure.

At startup, the Portfolios view is automatically selected and lists all loaded portfolios. This is where you load, unload, create, delete - and, most importantly, compare - your portfolios; and this is where you single out portfolios which you want to zoom in on using the Assets, Quotes, Transactions and System views. The latter are all portfolio-specific and (of course) customizable: the Assets view of portfolio A need not be anything like the Assets view of portfolio B.

For instance, creating a new chart can be as easy as picking it from Investment Studio's object gallery. But you can also rewrite the chart's definition to completely alter which data it displays and how, and then add the new chart to the object gallery for future reuse.

Customization is generally possible at several levels, from basic to advanced. A chart can be moved around and resized with the mouse; its display properties (colors, fonts, axes etc.) can be modified extensively using its pop-up menu; its definition may allow one or more numerical parameters to be modified on the fly using sliders; new entries may be added to its definition using the pop-up menu's Favorites section; and the definition may be edited explicitly.

Charts are not all there is, of course. Investment Studio has several customizable object classes (grids, charts, graphs, browsers) which you can use to create your own screens.

"New sites cannot be added by the user. They must be configured by us."

The same can be said of most Internet-aware investment software. The reasons vary from bad programming to thinly veiled attempts to lock you into proprietary data formats and quote feeds. When one of the supported quote servers changes its format (as they regularly do) you then get something along the following lines:

"The downloader is not working due to recent changes in the server's quote format. Please check back soon for an updated version."

In contrast, you can set up Investment Studio to parse just about any quote format and download data from just about any FTP or web source. URLs can be static or dynamically generated (e.g. to reflect the current date or to crawl dynamically generated pages); the data can be parsed using simple text format strings or scripts written in any ActiveX scripting language (e.g. JScript). You have full control; if a quote server changes its format, you can adapt your download definitions immediately instead of having to wait for somebody else to fix things.

Investment Studio lets you leverage your existing knowledge. If you can use a spreadsheet like Excel or Lotus 1-2-3, you can program Investment Studio data grids, charts, graphs and trading systems, drawing from almost 400 powerful built-in functions which range from matrix algebra to technical indicators to digital filters and advanced spectral methods. If that still isn't enough for you, you can define your own functions using the ActiveX Scripting language of your choice. If you've ever written an Excel macro, you'll feel right at home creating custom Investment Studio functions.

In Investment Studio, every portfolio can have its own, tailor-made rules, written in the same familiar, spreadsheet-like syntax used to define charts and data grids. Testing new ideas on historical data is easy: enter your rules, specify the date range and see how your portfolio would have fared. Study individual transactions in the Transactions view; analyze trading activity in each asset in the Assets view; compare overall system performance in the Portfolios view. Where other investment software only gives you a fixed-format performance report (typically limited to trading in a single asset), Investment Studio lets you dissect every aspect of a multi-asset trading system's behaviour using your choice of diagnostic tools.

When you've identified a promising approach, it's time to let Investment Studio's multivariate optimizer find the best parameter settings. Of course, the measure of what's "best" is a formula which you can edit any way you like.