In highly volatile markets, informed decision making can be achieved through education, testing, and practice. APEX, with its paper portfolio trading capabilities and institutional-grade equities and digital assets, offers a user-friendly and feature-rich infrastructure for both institutions and individuals
Through simulation, market trading and management can be tested and validated across a range of strategies. The value add of testing such strategies provides a valuable tool to any trader and portfolio manager, as the ability to pursue in depth market analysis and management can be undertaken at little to no cost.
A leading asset manager, ranked high by AUM*, utilised the simulation feature to educate and equip its trading department. Competitions were held over a defined period to add a gamification aspect and foster healthy competition through APEX’s ROI live-ranking system.
The methodology of each simulation will be explained to examine each competition in detail.
Competition 1.
1. Each Individual is provided with $100,000 paper cash within their balance.
2. Individuals were freely able to allocate that said balance across as many portfolios, baskets or individual equity stocks and digital assets as desired.
3. Team functionality also developed allowed a $500,000 paper cash balance regardless of the number of individuals within the team.
Team functionality fosters internal discussion, collaboration, and communication among employees, enhancing overall resources and knowledge. The unique strengths of each team member can be leveraged to boost productivity and improve results.
4. You may buy, sell, or rebalance your portfolios at any time. Categories were developed to provide initial ground to get started. Digital Assets were available across multiple crypto exchanges.
5. Finally, rank is sorted by ROI (%), across the individual leaderboard and the team leaderboard, with ROI locked in once and digital asset or stock position is sold, combining to your total ROI score.
The first competition received outstanding engagement, feedback, and results for the product and user experience, leading to the addition of more features and another competition. The software architecture remained unchanged, but new features were added based on its progression and helpful feedback.
Competition 2
Additional Features:
1. Stocks, across S&P 500, NASDAQ and NYSE were all enabled.
2. APEX introduced Algorithmic Trading to provide smart market functionality and automation.
The introduction of algorithmic position taking and trading greatly improved user functionality and amplified their strategy options for varying portfolios.
In this guide, the algo functionality is explained:
1. Set Up an algo to automatically:
Buy or sell an asset [BUY/SELL]
Accumulate an asset [ACCUMULATOR]
Exit all positions associated with an asset [AUTO EXIT]
2. Specify conditions to trigger algorithmic execution using natural language
Create simple or sophisticated conditions using current price or technical indicators.
Here are three examples to understand usability
Buy when Apple’s current price is greater than $145. Sell when Apples current price is greater than $148
Buy Condition: c > 145 Sell Condition: c > 150 2)
Buy when Bitcoin’s relative strength index is less than 30. Sell when Bitcoin’s relative strength index is greater than 70
3. To help formulation of algo’s, real-time chart analysis is available during strategy creation, overlaying selected technical indicators, aiding the process to completion and running of the algo.
Simulation in Numbers
Each competition's data, including engagement, ranking, ROIs, and detailed trades, is securely stored for institutional use. The data offers valuable insights into strategies and individual/group performance. During the competition, 1792 trades were conducted on 219 stocks/assets with a total of $34m traded. 167 algorithmic strategies were created with a top ROI of 38%, and 84% of traders outperformed the market benchmark. The best trader achieved an ROI of 92%.
Conclusion
APEX is proud to offer immersive capabilities to top professionals in the industry and aims to continuously improve and develop its product as an educational resource and powerful tool for institutions.
Feedback and continual development are crucial to the success and growth of our products. By offering institutions a simulation experience across markets, feedback and usage data drive our capabilities forward.
APEX’s innovative BDAaS tech stack and powerful API enable low-latency, real-time market analysis and trading, providing educational tools for institutions exploring new markets. APEX empowers users to refine their skills, theories, strategies, and techniques, giving them an advantage to achieve effective and progressive results.