In this issue:
I. April in Paris
II. NeuroShell Classifier for investing and trading – Commentary by CEO Steve Ward
III. Bug fix release NeuroShell Trader 4.7 will be available in a week or two.
IV. Special Add-on deal for Existing NeuroShell Trader customers
V. One way to stop this newsletter
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I. April in Paris
This is no April Fool’s joke! Show your April Love that your trading is not just a hobby. Buy the NeuroShell Trader Professional or NeuroShell DayTrader Professional so you can make enough money to enjoy April in Paris with your significant other. Drink April Wine under the April Moon on the Champs-Élysée. If you buy during the month of March, take 15% off of the list prices of the NeuroShell Trader Professional or NeuroShell DayTrader Professional.
If you already own the NS Trader or NS Trader Professional, and you upgrade in April to either the NS Trader Pro or the NS DayTrader, we’ll give you 15% off the upgrade price! You’ll be singing “I’ll Remember April.”
To be fair to our business and science customers, we will extend the 15% discount to the purchase of the AI Trilogy.
This sale is being extended through April 15.
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II. NeuroShell Classifier for investing and portfolio management – Commentary by CEO Steve Ward
Usually we pitch the NeuroShell Trader for trading, but it isn’t very appropriate for trading with fundamentals. That’s because pure fundamental data doesn’t change more than once a quarter. Most of you know I don’t think much of investing in stocks in the new millennium (as opposed to trading them), but if you are going to do it, do it with fundamentals and leave the technicals to real traders. The NeuroShell Classifier works better than anything for building neural nets with fundamental inputs, so it fits the bill. I will tell you that there are some very large and well known financial companies managing their huge portfolios today with NeuroShell Classifier.
If you are using the NeuroShell Classifier, then you are just trying to decide if your stock is going UP or DOWN. You want to know if it is BUY, HOLD, or SELL. In other words, you are dividing the future into categories as opposed to predicting the future price of the stock. Category sets would be like either {UP, DOWN} or {BUY, SELL, HOLD}.
Now the Classifier is not a financial or trader oriented product. It is a general purpose neural network system. It doesn’t read data feeds or make stock charts. It reads text files you export from Microsoft Excel. Anyway, data feeds are usually providing technical data, and you probably want to collect some fundamental data.
Having said all of the above about fundamental data, I will admit that I have indeed used the Classifier to make technical nets, both for end of day and intraday trading. I export text files out of NeuroShell DayTrader Professional, and do any special purpose preprocessing I need in Excel. That might include sorting out days I don’t want to include, sorting out times I don’t want, and maybe some other things difficult in the Trader.
Next I use the data to build nets in the Classifier. The neural net paradigms being used there are different than those in the Trader and have other advantages. Once trained, I can actually fire the finished nets from NeuroShell DayTrader using the indicators you will find in the category called External Program and Function calls. Oh, I forgot to mention, you need the NeuroShell RunTime Server for that, too. (A good buy would be the AI Trilogy, a highly discounted package that includes not only Classifier and RunTime Server, but NeuroShell Predictor and GeneHunter. You can build your own NeuroShell DayTrader with all of that).
If you want to embed these nets into your own trading software, you can do that, too. We even have for sale an interface for firing the nets in TradeStation (TM – TradeStation Technologies).
I realize the above explanations are brief, but if anyone wants to really get into the possibilities you may call me.
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III. Bug fix release NeuroShell Trader 4.7 will be available in a week or two.
Our programmers have just finished fixing some obscure bugs that our users have been reporting. The fixes are in release 4.7 which we are testing now. Watch www.ward.net for release date and information about how you can obtain it. It is a free download for current 4.x owners. If you received a 4.6 CD from us this month (March 2005) or later we will send you a free replacement CD if you do not wish to download 4.7.
Here is a list of the bugs fixed in 4.7:
Fixed a rare bug that caused misplaced trades and incorrect equity when using all of the following at the same time: Market Order entries, Market On Close exits, and the “Long/Short entries exit existing short/long positions” option.
Fixed problem where eSignal daily data was sometimes shifted in time by a day in some foreign time zones.
Fixed problem where eSignal daily data would not show the last full day’s data in some foreign time zones.
Fixed problem where eSignal daily historical data downloads would show data on the last Sunday due to mixing of eSignal’s intraday feed providing Sunday data, but eSignal’s end-of-day data feed not providing Sunday data.
Fixed problem where saved custom indicators where default parameter values were fractional, would not load the proper default value on a computer on which regional settings resulted in a different numeric format than the regional settings under which the indicator was originally created (for instance custom indicator created with U.S. regional setting that had a 0.07 default value would not have a default value of 0,07 under German regional settings).
Fixed problem where the average number of trades across multiple chart pages listed in the prediction and trading strategy results would round the average to the 2nd higher whole number instead of the nearest whole number (for example 50.8 was being rounded to 52 instead of 51).
Fixed runtime 52 that occurred when auto scanning a removable drive with no media
Fixed issues in trading strategy and prediction wizards where optimization parameters would show non-grayed in parameters dialog or be listed in parameters list when optimization not selected.
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IV. Special Addon deal for Existing NeuroShell Trader customers
Here’s a special deal we aren’t going to offer to new buyers. We’ll run this deal through April 15, so think of it as a consolation prize for paying all those taxes on your trading earnings. Buy any two addons and get the third free (excluding Cybernetic Analysis). For our VIP customers (those who have spent $4000 or more at Ward Systems over the years), buy one and get one free (excluding Cybernetic).
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V. One way to stop this newsletter
Just change your email address and don’t tell us.
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