See Also

Investor's Portal

Project was done for a private investment group specializing in quantitative and systematic trading for private accounts over Internet. An independent managed futures’ and alternative investment database & resource for individual investors, professional money managers, introducing brokers and institutional investors was created to meet customer needs.
Intuitive and easy to use interface was created to help users organize their company and program information, search through database, organize search results and compare investment programs. Comprehensive financial statistics is calculated for investment programs and is presented in a friendly form allowing customization.
Powerful administrative interface provides means to control accounts, companies and programs information, enable/disable/remove all available entities of the system, act on behalf of each user. Administrator also has an ability to specify cost for each service provided by the system and specify discounts available via promotion codes.

Solution

The proposed system is an Internet based solution. It provides remote access to administrative functions and allows any potential clients to find information about investment companies, active investment programs, see financial statistics, compare program performance. Create their own companies and programs. Download and automatically send printable program detail pages in PDF format which provide comprehensive branding capabilities. Program information is represented in numeric as well as in graphic form via charts.
The application provides different access levels for different user roles. There are 4 user roles in the application:basic user, Pro user, CTA user and Administrator. It also has public part available to not authenticated users.

The public part is used to represent information about the system, allows users to register and log in. It provides information about the company and investment basics; all info pages are easy to customize.
Basic users do not pay for registration. They can search through database and manage their watch lists from dashboard page. However some statistical information is hidden from them and they do not have access to branding features. Also they cannot obtain printable version of program details on the fly – they can request it to be delivered 24 hours later.
Pro users have to pay for registration (administrator defined price for 1 year subscription). They can search through database and manage their watch lists from dashboard page. Pro users have full access to all statistical information and have access to branding features. Also they can obtain printable version of program details on the fly.
CTA users have access to all basic user features, can optionally subscribe to Pro user services. In addition they can publish information about their investment programs, perform marketing campaigns.

Architecture

The application consists of several logical modules:
  • Database is used to store all information about users, companies, programs.
  • Data access layer is a middle tier between database and application logic.
  • Business logic manages calculation, registration, and other features provided by the system.
  • Front end is responsible for displaying application pages. It is separated from business logic in order to provide flexible and easy way to improve application appearance without addressing application logic.
  • Maintenance module is executed by Cron scheduler to perform periodic tasks such as sending notifications and marketing emails, updating home page statistics. Using Cron allows users to specify how often maintenance will take place. More often it results in better time accuracy, but can potentially affect system performance.

Tools and Technologies

  • PHP
  • Smarty template engine
  • Third party PDF generation library
  • Third party chart generation library
  • My SQL
  • Data access framework internally developed by team

Benefits

The proposed solution was based on incomplete customer requirements. Team managed to investigate formulas to calculate all required statistics, invented application architecture to fit all requirements. Smarty template engine allows performing easy and independent changes in code and in front end sections, meaning you will not accidentally damage any code while updating UI and vice versa.
The chosen configuration has also additional benefits:
  • The proposed solution is lightweight, meaning strong hardware configuration is not required to run the web site.
  • The solution is cross platform and can work on Windows Unix, Linux and MacOS operating systems.
  • Only free / open source third party tools are needed to run the system.