Quuve provides a pro-grade integrated environment for portfolio management and research for securities investors. Professional grade in that it was meant to be licensed out to firms/groups offering research & portfolio management services. It is a virtualized, scaleable, web application developed with Pharo and deployed on GemStone/S. See the Quuve Overview video on YouTube for more information.
Quuve development stopped in the Fall of 2017 due to a lack of funding, however it still has some cutting-edge features for the industry. Because Quuve can function as an institutional level data server, tailored mobile apps could be built as standalone technology – and such an approach could even take advantage of Quuve’s analyst/site model subscription selections.
Software Positives:
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Using a Glorp-like interface to access data: Quuve has successfully run on Pharo (stand alone for development, backed by Fuel), Gemstone (deployment), and with portions backed using a relational DB – not required nor used at present. Quuve provides DB admin tools including import/export of DB’s in part or full; deleted records access tables, and more. User permission-masks can be granted by DB, table, even patterns in records.
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Generic CRUD tables UI allows for rapid class development/usage – see ApplicationContext (stack with preferences style inheritance).
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3-tier model (application, site, user) for data and Rules, allows site (group) and user specific overrides, which is important in Finance, where few will agree on how to define “free cash flow” in one accounting system, or one industry, let alone globally.
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Processors allow for dynamic code-based answers to data requests; they blur the lines between data and Rules. Any object can be wrapped with a Processor and have data and rules added dynamically. Rules allow data-requests to perform any operation a modern computer can perform, and most often these are simple math operations on series. Rules are organized by “analyst” names (akin to rules’ Classes), the specifications for analysts is user specific, allowing for dynamic-inheritance required for a pro-grade multi-user Finance application pulling in international data (using different source accounting standards). Rules are compiled on demand; all caching is dynamic and user specific. Rules can be defined using wild-card method-names to open up entire remote volumes of data, or data transformations, with a new pattern. Data series are very robust around missing data and math errors. Quuve includes time profiling and debugging method-trace system to understand data missing or debug errors – enabled in user-specific permissions.
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Demonstrated integration of learning systems for analysis and portfolio management (“robo-trading”). Data-sampling uses “point in time view” to support accurate backtesting. Portfolios have the unique feature of being able to scroll backwards in time to any date to see the specific holdings there – as models are built from trade-event records.
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Access to millions of FREE data series from sites like FRED (St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank – USA), World Bank, etc. – menu selectable in report writer!
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NPI (Non-public information) masking tools – important for privacy in professional Finance office.
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Script Tool allows for ad hoc testing – most tools like the company report tool also incorporates an ad hoc scripting area.
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User-specific configurable DB tables access, window access, etc. User and DB bindings specified in CSV files for bootstrapping.
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Programmer documentation in wiki & in-system help-notes. Some ‘company reports’ are training tools.
Software Issues (“opportunities”!):
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Quuve development stopped in the Fall of 2017 due to a lack of funding; some dialogs already look a bit out-dated.
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Some external libraries (e.g. javascript charting) require external licenses – see Credits listed below.
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Professional grade data must be licensed for individual or larger group – please consult us. Note: we can provide small amounts of CSV data for testing company reports. Perhaps we can form a consortium to license pro-grade data – but we need a Champion to lead the way. CSV data can load on-demand and depends only on the user’s data-source selection via preference or dialog-input specification. Small amounts of data can be sourced from certain sites on an individual basis but not commercially, e.g. yahoo, google, etc.
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Data loaded currently into one default currency – defined in data-loaders – the idea was to use “table decorators” model to map data to any currency at current exchange ratio or historical.
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Dropbox was used for file-sharing on cloud servers – not required for local Pharo execution.
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Quuve configuration has not been updated in 18 months.
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In recent years only Apple platforms were used for Pharo development.
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Currently there is minimal support for Quuve. We can add users to our existing programmer wiki and slack-threads to pick up where we left off. In adding users we would prefer a few dedicated champions. There are tools that can be harvested for non-Finance applications. We can add a few trusted users to our current demonstration server, but this contains data that cannot be shared, so we must be selective!
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Latest working image was Pharo 6.1 32 bits and GemStone 3.4.0
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Latest instructions to load code are in our devwiki titled DevelopmentBootstrapping_IAM – only a few dedicated users will be added initially.
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Code is in smallhub and should become public, MIT, and possibly moved to Github. This is an immediate need!
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GemStone scripts to build new sites, maintenance etc are in gitlab – again, we can start providing access selectively!
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We have only one server, running in Linode: https://cloud.linode.com/linodes/866838/summary
More info:
Currently copyrighted to Debris Publishing, Inc. – This is changing to MIT License.
Quuve is intended to assist investors manage portfolios and perform research.
Quuve was built and deployed using tools from various sources. The following firms, organizations, communities, and individuals have not endorsed Quuve nor Debris, but we offer due credit whether they are aware of us or not. Many thanks for/to…
Development and deployment environments and platforms
Pharo (c) Pharo.org Pharo is our development platform, language and environment.
GemStone (c) GemTalk Systems We use GemStone system to deploy and run each Quuve site for production. In addition, GemStone serves as our scalable object database.
Web frameworks
Seaside Web Framework The web UI of Quuve is built using Seaside: a great web framework ideal for developing dynamic and complex applications
Twitter Bootstrap for Seaside Bootstrap is very nicely integrated in Seaside web framework and we use it for styling and designing Quuve web components.
Highcharts for Seaside All our web charts use Highcharts JS bindings for Seaside
Magritte Magritte provides us a nice and small meta-description framework which allow us to build a fully featured CRUD system. Most of Quuve forms and reports are automatically generated from our CRUD framework build on top of Magritte.
Development tools and frameworks
Fuel Serializer We use Fuel to save and load our development and testing databases when working in Pharo platform
SIXX Serializer SIXX is used to move small databases from GemStone to Pharo or vice-versa or between different GemStone instances
Metacello To manage software dependencies, releases, environment building, deploying, etc. we use Metacello
Zinc and Zodiac HTTP Components Both are used as HTTP and HTTPS clients. In Addition, Zinc is used as the web server when using Seaside in Pharo
Blowfish We use Blowfish as part of our encryption and decryption tools.
XMLParser We also need to parse and write XML in many places
Javascript Libraries
JQuery and JQuery-UI Even if small, most of our JS development is using JQuery when possible. In addition, a couple of components like autocompletion, popups, sortable lists, etc are used from JQuery-UI
TinyMCE For nicely editing notes, documents, etc. we use the fully WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE
Datatables To improve or HTML tables and reports we use Datatables. This allow us to have fixed header, fixed columns and many many other features.
CodeMirror For scripting, editing accounting and computation rules, and many other places, we use CodeMirror to color highlight code, autocomplete, etc.
Infrastructure
CentOS Linux All our guest/virtual operating systems are CentOS Linux, with latest stable release and security updates.
Nginx Our web server for production purposes is nginx.
Monit We use monit to monitor all processes, being that Quuve ones or the ones we need from the Operating System. Monit will, for example, automatically restart Quuve processes upon crashes.
Fail2ban As part of our security efforts we use fail2ban to protect us from DOS attacks and from malicious user
Firewalld We also use firewalld as out OS firewall
Weekly news about Pharo 