Filtering companies by multiple criteria

Broker’s activities meet certain difficulties. Sometimes brokers have to be careful with choosing of the list of companies to work with them. It can be associated with unwillingness to invest in some kind of companies in general or with strict laws and political restrictions in particular. For example, Muslims can not invest in “PLA” (“Playboy Enterprises, Inc”), because it will be a co-owner of the pornography business. The same is true for BTI (tobacco industry) and UWN (gambling industry) companies.

Our company worked out the new methods of useful filtering companies, which can be applied not only for Muslim restrictions but for all trading business in general.

It means that if you as a broker will receive a list of companies (of course, on a daily basis since IPOs could happen every trading day) in a spreadsheet, you can remove unwanted companies from a list of more than 6,500 traded symbols. For example, you do not want your customers to trade companies which deal with gambling or companies that have lots of debts.

The application connects to the market data feeds and downloads data on a daily basis. Market data feeds include financial documents; market fundamental information; sectors, industries and companies lists. Quotes and charts are loaded by request. This info is downloaded in the database and is saved permanently. Client (a Silverlight application) has access to this information and allows filtering companies by multiple criteria. Companies are grouped by country/sector/industry and are shown in a tree view. A user can select/deselect industry, sector or even the entire country to restrict trading for the underlying companies.

Content of any node can be viewed at the market map area: sectors by country, Industries by sector and companies by industries.

On the market map you can see filtering results, market fundamental data and other useful information all in one place. Charting and quotes are accessible from the market map as well. Just double click the company’s rectangle and a modal window will popup. A window with charting and quotes available from market map panel. It’s possible to create any custom filters based on financial information and simple mathematical expressions.

For this filtering application you can use values from balance sheet, cash flow, income statement. As a market fundamental data market capitalization, EPS, P/E and more than 20 others can also be used. It’s possible to download a list of companies with filter results and other information in the popular formats PDF, Excel and CSV.

Our company used following technologies while developing the application: .NET Framework 4.0, C#, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Silverlight 4.0. Web-application is installed on IIS 7.0 on a MS Windows 2008 machine. Also, Windows 2003 is supported. Silverlight client was tested for compatibility with all popular browsers: Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 3+, Safari 3+, Chrome 2+, Opera 9+.

As an addition to the user interface functionality a well-document API is exposed to use in 3rd party software applications. It allows doing exactly the same as the client application from the code. Help for API is available both in HTML and CHM formats.