Investment Studio > Views

Investment Studio's main window is organized in pages, commonly referred to as views. You select a view by clicking its tab, just below the title bar:

Each view specializes on a different set of tasks:

	The Portfolios view is automatically selected when you launch Investment Studio. All loaded portfolios are listed here; this is where you load, unload, create and delete portfolios; and this is where you select which portfolio you want to work with in the Assets, Quotes, Transactions and System views. The latter are all used to "zoom in" on various aspects of the selected portfolio, and can therefore be considered as "subviews" of the Portfolios view. When no entry is selected in the Portfolios view, these subviews are empty.
	In Assets, the focus is on portfolio composition. This is where you add components to the selected portfolio, analyze their value and performance relative to other portfolio components and study their contribution to overall portfolio growth.
	While the Assets view is primarily about values, the Quotes view is all about prices. Here you can study the individual price action of portfolio components, much as you would in a traditional technical analysis and charting program, and edit all quotes.
	Transactions is where you keep track of your buying and selling. The data you enter here is used to compute up-to-date asset and portfolio values in the Assets and Portfolios views. Transactions can also be generated automatically by the portfolio's trading system (see below).
	System is the last portfolio "subview". It's used to define and optimize rules for mechanical trading in the selected portfolio.
	In Macros, you can develop and test your own Investment Studio functions in the ActiveX scripting language of your choice (e.g. JScript or VBScript). Functions defined here are globally available in all Investment Studio grids, charts and graphs.
	The Downloads view is where you tell Investment Studio how to obtain quote updates. Quotes can be downloaded from the web and from FTP servers or imported from files on your hard drive. Quote update instructions are grouped in lists which can be submitted for processing from within Investment Studio or from external command line tools, e.g. the Windows task scheduler.
	Finally, the Web view lets you create "mosaics" of web browser objects for quick browsing of related sites and/or files.

Most views are based on a set of building blocks commonly referred to as objects. The recurrence of these objects throughout Investment Studio simplifies your work by presenting you with a consistent user interface instead of a multitude of special cases.