MathWorks Intros Financial Engineering Toolbox
The MathWorks, Inc. extended its software tools for quantitative financial research and application development with the new Financial Time Series Toolbox. A companion to the Company's core product, MATLAB, the Financial Time Series Toolbox is a set of tools designed for the analysis of time series data. The toolbox is intended for financial professionals, including financial engineers, quantitative researchers, and investment managers in fixed income and portfolio management, who must base their research on historical time series.
The Financial Time Series Toolbox extends the functionality of MATLAB by providing a date-aware object that facilitates the manipulation, analysis, and preparation of financial data suitable for further analysis using other tools in the MATLAB environment, such as the GARCH, Neural Network, Statistics, and System Identification toolboxes. Ideally suited to analysis involving time series or historical data, such as equity prices or interest rate fluctuations, the toolbox explicitly highlights the relationship between data and dates, allowing financial professionals to easily and intuitively manage their data.
"With MATLAB as its foundation, the Financial Time Series Toolbox enables users to perform date-aware time series analysis while leveraging MATLAB's built-in capabilities for programming, mathematical functions, data analysis, and graphics as well as its application-specific toolboxes," said Eugene McGoldrick, Ph.D., Development Manager, Financial Products, at The MathWorks. "As a result, The MathWorks offers an integrated environment for enhanced financial analysis and application development, an environment we will continue to expand."
The Financial Time Series Toolbox is composed of programmable MATLAB files, providing users with access to its source code. This allows users to view, edit, and modify the toolbox functions or add their own, thereby extending and customizing the environment to suit their individual needs.
The Financial Time Series Toolbox provides users with access to data transformation and technical analysis functions. Using these functions, users can transform and manipulate data contained in the time series object. Data transformation and analysis function areas include leading and lagging data, frequency transformation, filtering and differencing, Box-Cox transformation, and moving average and smoothing. The technical analysis routines for computing and displaying common performance indicators include oscillators, indexes, and stochastics. For graphical visualization, the toolbox easily displays time series data in graphic form using plotting functions, such as high-low, candle, and annotated plots. An interactive charting tool allows users to display the relationship among several series.
The Financial Time Series Toolbox is one of many MATLAB-based products that provide a complete, fully integrated set of tools for financial engineering. These tools support the entire financial application development process from academic research to quantitative research and prototyping, all the way through to application development and deployment to the end user. With MATLAB's open, component-based architecture, users may choose only the toolboxes and extensions they need.
The Financial Time Series Toolbox is available immediately and can be purchased from The MathWorks Store at http://www.mathworks.com/store for Windows 95, 98, and NT, and UNIX platforms. North American pricing for the toolbox starts at $595, and it requires MATLAB 5.3 and the Financial Toolbox.
Established in 1984, The MathWorks, Inc., a company of 500 people based in Natick, Mass., develops, markets, and supports MATLAB, Simulink, and a family of data analysis toolboxes for engineers, scientists, and technical professionals. MATLAB provides the foundation and computational engine for all of The MathWorks products. Widely recognized as the industry's premier language for technical computing, MATLAB provides comprehensive math and visualization functionality, and a powerful high-level language for users to interactively explore, analyze, design, and prototype solutions to their problems. Simulink is a graphical, block-diagram environment for modeling, analyzing, and simulating a broad range of dynamic nonlinear systems. Application toolboxes are available for specialized functions. The MathWorks products are used throughout the world in industries such as automotive, aerospace, environmental, telecommunications, computer peripherals, economics, finance, and medical. More than 400,000 users at the world's leading industrial, government, and educational organizations rely on The MathWorks products for tremendous gains in productivity.