Friday, October 28, 2011

Report to the Instructor

As we near the end of the semester, I thought I would describe some of the capability available to instructors for evaluating student activity and performance in our real time system.  As I have written elsewhere in this blog, our emphasis is not just on performance, it has much more to do with the practical implementation of principles of investments.  So the market value or the Sharpe ratio may only be a small part of what is needed for a full evaluation.

An instructor can obtain the complete history of every student at any time by selecting “Instructor Reports” from the Reports menu item:

 The resulting window gives you everything you could conceivably want (I have hidden the actual numbers in the next picture since these are real accounts):

 The “normal” reports include daily market values compared to the benchmark, as well as a variety of performance measures.  We also show the rank of each student along various dimensions as you can see.  Note the “Export to Excel” button: you can transfer any report into an Excel spreadsheet by clicking this button.

The “Download Trade Activity” button lets you see who traded on what date.  This is critical when you need a project to start on a given date and end on a given date; you can monitor whether students are implementing their positions or not.

Beyond that, you can download the entire trading history of any student (buttons on the right hand part of the image).  This allows you to check their project reports against their actual trades.  You can also generate reports for a specific student once you have downloaded their history:


A students history is, of course, also available to the student; the instructor can additionally access request this for every student.  You can see every trade, a detailed replay of the the history of any security, and, perhaps most useful, the P&L reports.  These come in two forms: a summary report and a detailed report per security.  The following pictures give you an idea:
The detailed report shows you exactly what happened and when by security.

Of course, students are always interested in overall performance.   Here is an example of that report: