CQG Adds Visual Tools to Portfolio Monitors, Spreadsheet Displays

Market data, charting and trading software vendor CQG has added charts and data visualization tools to the Portfolio Monitor feature of its Integrated Client desktop, and now supports Microsoft Excel’s RealTimeData (RTD) function to provide tighter integration with CQG’s data, enabling clients to consume and analyze data in customized spreadsheets that act as data displays.

CQG added Portfolio Monitors to the Integrated Client desktop last year to enable users—primarily technical traders—to view market data, charts and analytics for multiple instruments on a single screen. Now, the vendor has made data visualization capabilities—such as histograms to enable users to visualize more data quickly, as well as technical studies developed by CQG or proprietary studies developed by a firm’s traders—available in Portfolio Monitors for beta testing.

Once this testing phase is complete, the vendor plans to roll out a production release by year-end, says Marcus Kwan, vice president of product strategy and design at CQG.

In addition, users can define conditions, which the platform flags when a security meets those conditions—for example, when the current price exceeds the moving average—and can quickly scan the screen to see what symbols meet their conditions.

“While traditional quote boards give you a snapshot of what’s happening right now, and while charts can provide that historical and analytical perspective, what we’re doing is combining all that in this small amount of screen real estate,” Kwan says.

While traditional quote boards give you a snapshot of what’s happening right now, and while charts can provide that historical and analytical perspective, what we’re doing is combining all that in this small amount of screen real estate

Historically, futures traders became experts in trading one or two products, but more are now realizing that the techniques they developed for those products can also be applied to a broad range of symbols—particularly as markets become more electronic, which also makes trading in multiple markets easier, says Mark Fischer, vice president of product management at CQG. So the ability to see more symbols and analytics, and to be able to process this information quickly to find new correlations is increasingly important, Fischer adds.

Furthermore, traders can now also place a trade directly from Portfolio Monitors. “We want to give traders handy, information-rich views to perform their analytics and make decisions, and then execute on those decisions directly from the same platform,” Kwan says.

Spreads in Spreadsheets
CQG is also now leveraging the RTD function of Excel to deliver real-time data and provide similar types of visualizations as Portfolio Monitors within spreadsheets, enabling users to create what looks like a trading screen within Excel, driven by the vendor’s data, says Thom Hartle, director of product training at CQG.

Previously, CQG supported Excel’s DynamicDataExchange (DDE) format, and provides clients a tool for converting DDE-format spreadsheets to RTD format to take advantage of RTD’s capabilities, including the ability to reference cells with real-time data to drive calculations.

CQG is providing pre-built sheets to serve different use cases—for example, a spreadsheet for monitoring up to four different symbols and performing correlation analysis, or a spreadsheet designed for natural gas and energy traders that incorporates “strips” (the average daily settlement price of futures contracts over the next 12 months)—and will also work with clients to customize proprietary spreadsheets to their requirements.

Some of the data visualizations delivered via Excel could include color-coding correlation calculations to highlight the most positive or negative correlations depending on user-defined thresholds, to make it easier for users to quickly spot extremes. “Rather than having to look at the numbers to see what’s above 90 or below negative 30, the data visualization takes away the pain of doing the arithmetic in your head to understand what’s going on in the market,” Hartle says.