Since 1990, several of my students and I have engaged in research, directed toward the development of software to support futures-trading decision-making. The present objective is to commercially disseminate this software via a dot-com website, and/or via a software vendor.

Our research currently focuses on the maintenance of two analytic models that Student-Members of the College of Business and Technology Investment Club at Western Illinois University will use to guide their futures trades. Although the Investment Club specializes in speculative day-trades, these models can be useful to both hedgers and speculators, of various time-frames.

My students have found that -- after using these models for some time on a day-to-day basis -- they would like to access them after they leave the WIU campus upon graduation. Principally, it is for this reason that a commercial venture is being evaluated.

Since my Students are primarily interested in Midwest US agricultural markets -- corn, soybeans, wheat, hogs, and cattle -- we plan to initially provide information for only those markets via a dot-com website. The dot-com will provide two types of information. Firstly, it will present each model's daily price-direction outlook for each market. Secondly, for each of these markets, it will present each model's outlook-accuracy for the previous 20 trading-days.

The fee for this information will be equivalent to one tick: $12.50 for CBT grains, and $10 for CME livestock. Since the one-month outlook-accuracy will be consulted before the fee-based outlook is requested, the user will be able to avoid the expense of accessing outlook that is judged to be unreliable. A prototype of a dot-com can be found here.

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Last Modification July 2000.