Simcoe Trading

My vision for building a Bloomberg-like trading terminal is to make it a one-and-done platform for research and trading, with the express goal of making a broad but very useful feature set.

Some of my most-used functions/features for equity research and discovery are EQS, SECT, and PORT. EQS (1st picture) is an equity screener that allows me to find new securities based on factors like the type of stock that it is, market cap, and country. SECT (2nd picture) is also used for discovery, but is categorized by GIC sectors to make getting sector-specific exposure in your portfolio easy. PORT (3rd picture) allows me to see correlations between securities, a security's portfolio weight relative to its risk, VaR, and even hypothetical shocks.

I've used each of these functions extensively to find stocks to start building a portfolio, though I feel like they can be improved and accompanied by other useful functions. If you trade or invest, what functions do you most often use, or would personally want in this kind of program?

After working at RBC, I started looking more at bank rates and how world events like the war in Iran are impacting the global economy and monetary policy. For that reason, one of the first functions I worked into my terminal was an analogue to Bloomberg's WIRP screen to be able to monitor major central bank decisions and decision probabilities, and it's probably one of my favourite functions. That being said, I also made a function for macro-minded people, allowing you to see many general economic trends in the US and Canada, and a financial modelling function to help make informed portfolio management decisions. You can find snapshots of them below.

What do you think of these functions, and how can I make them better?

The Bank of Canada and the Fed are both meeting tomorrow, 4 hours apart (BoC at 9:45am/Fed at 2:00pm). The BoC is priced in to hike the central bank rate +25bps to 2.5% (~79%), seeing its first hike since July 2023. The Fed is expected to hold for now (~90%), though is expected to hike later, in future meetings.

The expectation to hike BoC rates is unsurprising. Reasons include depreciation of the CAD against the USD, headline CPI at 3.1%, just above the 3% upper limit, and a 23.5% YoY increase in commodity prices, namely oil.

I conducted my analysis with a market terminal I'm building. Its RATES screen lets me price implied central bank rate paths and hike probabilities directly from futures and T-bill curves, while MACRO and CURVE let me compare US and Canadian inflation, commodity prices, FX, and yield curves side by side using public data (Bank of Canada, FRED, BIS, futures prices).

If you were Macklem or Warsh, what would you do?