TradeStops

• Solution: Stock Tracking System
• Industry: Financial
• Technology Domain: .NET Development
• Technologies Used: ASP.NET, ADO.NET, HTML, JavaScript, COM+, Windows Services, Web Services

Launch

a U.S. based company providing investment and trading tools for individual investors approached iflexion with a request to provide support and develop additional functionality for their flagship product — TradeStops. The Customer expressed concerns regarding application’s stability, performance, and scalability. Iflexion goal was to carefully review the code and find ways of its improvement.

TradeStops aids individual investors in making efficient sell-buy decisions: it tracks one’s stocks and sends emails informing the user about the right time to sell them. Besides, it automatically tracks stock splits and dividend payments.

System Highlights:

• Easy to use risk-free product for tracking investment positions.
• No additional software is required, only a computer and web access.
• 24/7 access for data check at any time of the day, from any part of the world, enabling to spear the lion’s share from a stock move and minimize losses.
• Part of a trader’s risk management strategy, since the solution allows protecting downsides, keeping upside potential and reducing risks as the stock rises.
• Email notifications are provided on U.S and Canadian equities and mutual funds using CSI Market Data and can be sent to email, cell phone, or pager according to client’s preferences.

Challenge

Iflexion assigned a team of specialists consisting of a Project Manager, a Business Analyst, and a Developer that analyzed the existing architecture, database structure, and codebase, and defined a future development plan and development activities to be performed to archive all customer requirements.

The preliminary analysis discovered a number of bottlenecks:

• Website’s design was outdated and required some tuning or even redesign.
• The front-end of the website was built on the outdated Classic ASP technology and lacked scalability.
• The subscription module was not suitable for any advertising campaigns and marketing activities.
• The Historical Database (the database that stores information about stock prices, commodities, forex data, etc.) was poorly designed.
• The nightly update routine, which processes customers’ alerts, was built as a set of JavaScript-based scripts executed by a Windows command interpreter and therefore had serious performance issues.

Some of the steps that Iflexion suggested and carried out were:

• To extract the Historical database of stock prices into a separate database and optimize its structure for faster information retrieval.
• To decompose the nightly update process into two separate routines — (1) historical data update and (2) alerts processing in order to run them on different schedules and even on separate servers for faster performance.
• To develop a Web Services API for getting data from the Historical database and be able to build more services based on this data.
• To redevelop nightly update routines using the .NET compiled code as a Windows Service Application to improve their speed and stability.

Solution

Once this pre-development phase was completed, Iflexion implemented all proposed improvements and released them live. Besides enhancements in the business logic, our specialists redesigned the web site, optimized the subscription process and set up a number of advertising campaigns and marketing activities. They also implemented some data visualization features, e.g. Portfolio Charts.

The System is able to serve a larger user base due to the redevelopment of the nightly update process - a Windows Service that implements the logic of stock alerts calculation and delivery - speed increased about 20 times.

New stock exchange markets were added, e.g. London Stock Exchange, Toronto Stock Exchange, and some others, providing customers with more abilities to track their portfolios.

New data visualization features made the service more attractive for users.

After improvements had been introduced to the code, it became possible to develop additional services based on the solution. Later we have developed and released a desktop software for designing and publishing stock charts founded on online data, and an online service that provides stock related content and widgets for publishing on third-party websites.

Technology

The technical architecture of the solution is a realization of a multi-tier model. The layers of the system are the presentation layer (based on Classic ASP pages), business logic (server side or client side), Web services layer, and persistence (database) layer.

There are also several Windows Service applications built on the .NET technology that implement: daily stock historical data updates, business logic of alerts calculation, email delivery.

The rchitecture delivers a fast, stable and well-distributed system, which can be easily deployed on several servers for improved performance.