Teaching quantitative investment is hard. Especially now that Chat GPT is such a temptation for students. You have numerous complex topics to cover, but have to do it in a way that is engaging. If you just give your students a series of lectures and worksheets, many will not absorb the material. Equities Lab can make teaching easier for you, especially when you are on a time constraint.
Your students will interact with our abundant interface to demonstrate their understanding of quantitative concepts. Equities Lab’s auto-graded homework system gives them immediate feedback, giving them room to learn, experiment, and play.
You can fit multiple semesters of work into one. Students do not have to find, manage, clean, compact, and wrangle masses of data, and get quantitative backtesting algorithms exactly right. You can demonstrate complex features easily, and engage your students by using it as part of their coursework, either in projects, homework or simulated portfolios.
Sign up today, professor accounts are free! Student accounts are typically $50/student for a full-semester account or $30 for a half-semester course. Payment can come directly from students or the department.
Auto-Graded Interactive Assignments
- Provide instant feedback to students
- Specify Market time frames per assignment
- Customize public and hidden evaluation criteria
- Chose from a library of preconfigured assignments
- Rich analytics and visualizations allow students to understand and master the material
Virtual Stock Market Competitions
Students can…
- Buy and sell virtual stocks using real-time prices
- Put in orders for next market open/close
- Use optional web-based client for adding trades
- Add any number of trades
Professors can…
- Restrict the stocks your students can invest in.
(For example: no penny stocks, no mega-caps, only indexes, etc.) - Use rollup tables with metrics for quick grading
- Run multi-portfolio reports on the whole class
- Examine and grade each portfolio individually
- Export grades and metrics into Excel by student id
- See your students’ portfolios as they were on any day in the past or over any covered time span (up to 25 years in the past)
Built-in Market Anomalies
Some of our most popular anomalies and formulas
Valuation metrics
- Fama-French Factors
- P/E, P/S, P/FCF, Price/Whatever
- EBITA/EV and variants
- PEG ratio
Safety and Fraud detection
- Piotroski F-score
- Altman Z-score
- Beneish M-score
- Ohlson O-score
Technical analysis
- SMA, DMA and EMA
- Ichimoku clouds
- Triangles/Wedges
More than 1,000 searchable built-in strategies
- More than 500 public formulas
- More than 500 public screeners
- More thinking, synthesis, and analysis in your student reports
- Combine valuation and momentum
- Even complex formulas like AQR’s Quality Minus Junk can be easily modified and adapted
Heat Maps
What’s going on here? Over this backtest, the energy stocks sector (bottom right) vastly outperformed the rest, driving the performance of this portfolio.
Scatter Charts
Do yield curves matter? See the linear correlation of performance vs. yield curve steepness: the steeper the curve, the better the performance.
Line Graphs
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This strategy uses momentum, safety scores, valuation and income.
You can see each subcomponent tested along with the set of stocks that match all of the tests. Notice the handy stats and bar charts breaking down performance year by year.
Pie Charts
See what works and what doesn’t in your portfolio. This disaster of a screen failed almost everywhere, except for industrials and energy.
Classroom Management
- See all of your students per class and per semester
- Index all students by a student ID for easy merging
- Export all data to excel
- Ample metadata for every homework, including risk taken, criteria passed/failed, performance, and custom metrics
- Portfolio roll up views for each class, including hand entered grades, performance, risk taken (Alpha, Sharp Ratio, Beta, etc.), and custom metrics for any arbitrary date range
A sampling of metrics for your homeworks
Outliers
- Best/Worst position
- Best/Worst month
- Maximum drawdown
- Conditional value at risk
Metrics
- Trailing performance
- Annualized performance
- Alpha and beta
- Sharpe ratio
- Average number held
Probabilities
- Positions by percentile
- Months by percentile
- Odds by month of outperformance
- Odds by position of outperformance
Leverage Morningstar Data
Morningstar is an industry-leading data provider that Equities Lab uses to supply deep, comprehensive financials on American, Canadian, and Australian equities. This allows us to simulate, with splits and dividends handled correctly, almost any trading strategy involving technical or fundamental criteria.
- 20,000+ companies, both alive and dead
- 1,000+ financial data points, from AccountsPayable, AdditionalPaidInCapital and OtherIntangibleAssets through WorkInProgress to fields like UnbilledReceivables and UnearnedIncome
- Data going back to 1995
Leverage Macroeconomic Data
You can use any data series in the Federal Reserve of St Louis data set (FRED) to help your analysis.
- Cut and paste the URL into Equities Lab for instantaneous use
- Browse our curated list of useful FRED indicators
- Use our custom search to find the right data series
You can also use Quandl data the same way. (Fair warning; most of the good feeds from Quandl now require extra fees.)