Hi Gabe,
Several years ago, I looked at many of the
popular desktop trading platforms from an
acccessibility standpoint and found them all lacking.
Several reasons for this:
* The "chart" is at the center of their user-interface
* eye-catching user-interfaces that look visually
interesting are seldom accessible
* The toolkits used to build most of them are themselves lacking accessibility
the one partial exception to this was Ninja
Trader. Because it is based on .NET, and that
toolkit from Microsoft tends to be the most
accessible, I found Ninja Trader was accessible but not particularly usable.
Trading via the web was better. For example, I
know Ameritrade's web interface to be quite
usable. But these brokers have a tendency to
swap out an interface on Friday, and you can
easily find the new interface is unusable on
Monday. This happened with Schwab earlier this
year, but they've since fixed it.
For mere mortals who don't wish to roll their own
like Rick and myself, I can recommend Excel.
Excel has many add-ons available to pull
fundimental information from Yahoo Finance and
others. It can also be hooked up to live trading
from Interactive Brokers and others.
The beauty of Excel is that you can seeand
manipulate the raw data instead of struggling with a chart interface.
I'm also working on a completely command-line
interface to Interactive Brokers which I'll
release later this year. You can, for example,
buy 100 shares of Apple from the command line like this:
C:\>CLIB BUY 100 AAPL
Bought 100 shares of AAPL with a market order at 136.93
As the market for blind-friendly software is
small in general, and even smaller in an area
like investing, finding a group of like-minded
visually impaired investors has been challenging,
which is perhaps why there isn't more out there on this stuff.
Ben
At 11:17 AM 2/27/2017, you wrote:
Hey Ric,
That platform sounds something worth while, mainly, I am looking for a non-graphical way to recieve the same amount of infromation sighted people can get quickly from all of the grphs about stocks / companies.
Something like the synthesis data you are talking about would be pretty cool, but I am not well versed in fundamental analysis, nor do i particularly want to be :) My question is more so for suggestions for how you get your information in an accessible way, that like you said isn't pieceing five different web pages, and if there were any software options to 1. gather that information in a sort of dashboard, mainly, the Implied Volitility, the deltas, and thetas, current price, and maybe those numbers for the last year or so.
2. then to place those trades that I would like to
Idealy 1 and 2 would be through the same thing, but if they are seperate its no big deal, but I am just getting myself into the markets and been studying and listening to some things, and so not wanting to get invested or committed to a particular broker or platform and then figure out their software, website, etc, is not useable with screen readers.
-Gabe
On Sat, Feb 25, 2017 at 1:05 PM, Rick Thomas <<mailto:ofbgmail@xxxxxxxxx>ofbgmail@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Gabe:
Sabra is not an investor me thinks.
I have a platform I have built and used for about 15 years now.
I collect all the financial statements for about 2500 companies I have an
interest in watching - mostely the non penny stocks and store them in a
database.
My platform has many ways of making lists, portfolios, of stocks, sorting
filtering and comparing them on selected values.
It also handles preferred stocks and ties them into their parent company for
relative analysis of these issues as well.
There are many diferent ways I have setup to analyze the relative value of
portfolios of stocks within categories and industries or in several other
aggrigate dependancy groupings.
I am currently completely ReWriting the entire platform from scratch and am
currently performing the use case and IPO analysis based on my current UI
and a new source of data - Market Watch.
While the platform does use a database that would allow for distribution of
the platform, the platform is very very complicated to use and would only
make sense to a rather experienced investor well founded in fundemental
analysis.
Also, it is not set up for others to use so there is little and less
documentation surrounding the complex feature set and navigation options as
well as many custom ratios, margins, growth progressions etc...
Yahoo was my main source of information, along with several other sites I
aggritated data from, but it has become unusable so I have had to find
another data source and in the process have decided to do a complete
ReDesign of the project to simplify, consolidate and generally clean up 15
years of patchwork additions to the original code base.
It uses multi-core parallel processing and a generic database methodology
over a SQL Server CE Database so the code base is not something I would wish
on my worst enemy - thus another good reason for the Rewrite.
I don't think Sabras idea would help at all.
I know what you are asking and what you are going through trying to compare
and contrast companies online - it just isnt possible in any depth even with
those sloppy and usually inaccurate sites that offer automagic selection and
comparison based on properties you enter on their sites.
Even if you get a list you will take weeks, years, to try and compare them
by many detail line items like revenue, PretaxIncome, DebtToRevenue and
projectiions like expected return this year, next year and all the normal
ratios, growth rates, including BalanceSheet metrix growth rates and quickly
view say 8 or 10 quarters of infoinformation for each company in the list by
just arrowing up and down the list of companies with all those details in a
textbox just below the ticker list instead of having to click on one link at
a time, find the data and then back paging to the selection page, finding
where you left off and so on and so on not to mention you need to look at 3
web pages for every company ie balance sheet, income statement and cash flow
statement along with the profile and other pages then go back and start all
over for the next company.
It just isnt possible to say pull down 500 companies, filter out the ones
with the worst metrix, then sort the rest on say 100 to 200 metrix filtering
out those you think don't make the cut for what you are looking for until
you get down to the 10 best.
Then go through each line item of interest, you can specify as many quarters
or years as you are interested in, match the details of interest and pick
perhaps the best 5 for watching for them to go on sale or make a bid on.
No, I found using the internet websites perhaps better than just watching
the entertainment on CNBCÂ Â but these days I get my information from Yahoos
list of business news providers and watching Bloomberg TV and Radio.
There is just no simple way to make a buck investing in my opinion, mostely
it is a matter of luck unless you spend enough time at it to compete with
the pros and have the tools to give you an edge over most of the individual
investors out there.
The pros use Bloomberg Terminals which are the Gold Standard and the latest
Automated investment platforms are using very, very advanced software to
automatically pick stocks.
I don't try and beat them, just make a buck and not lose money since I play
with my retirement account and avoid any speculation whenever possible.
I am currently fully in cash, missed the entire Trump Rally, but have been
leaning twoard fixed income investing and will likely be laddering into
positions as the rates move up over the next year or 3.
If there is a 10 percent pullback I might look at some stocks I have on my
shopping list but they are all to expensive just now so I am waiting for
them to go on sale.
What exactly are you asking?
Are you a programmer or are you asking about some way to pick stocks or are
you looking for some software to use to help you and is this for gambling,
speculation, or for retirement investments?
Rick USA
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