Not a great day for financial analysts… July 13, 2007
Posted by James Webster in : finance , add a commentJPMorgan’s analysts publicly disagree over the likelyhood of an iPhone nano while others in the industry declare the output of sell-side analysts ‘is predominantly worthless’.
Ah, HERE is the web service API for my bank account!
Posted by James Webster in : web, finance , 6 commentsA long time ago I asked why my bank account did not have a web service API. I had come across Dimewise and thought it would be a great way to monitor my personal finances. The kicker was that it meant manually downloading my transaction history from my bank account and uploading it to Dimewise. Why can’t we just get a read-only API that allows us to download transaction history? Or why can we not have a machine-readable XML file emailed to us every week?
A few weeks later I came across Wesabe, best described as a Web 2.0 version of Quicken. They have some tools that automate downloading your transactions and uploading it to Wesabe, although these tools are at the mercy of the growing trend towards two-factor authentication on most internet banking websites. Alternatively Wesabe accepts CSV, OFX and other file upload formats commonly exported by banking websites. They take privacy very seriously having baked it into their architecture. Their tools use the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ to give you the option to clean up your transaction data and turn it into something useful (although I do find that the tools don’t really give me the fine control that I really need… Guys how about that regex or glob-based pattern matching approach that I requested?)
And just now, Wesabe have released an API. I am happy to see efforts to enable the banking public to get their financial data out of the roach motels that most banking websites are. Unfortunately now that I have moved back to the UK my current bank has NO transaction export capability whatsoever. Can anyone recommend a UK bank with a decent internet banking website that exports reasonable OFX data?!?!
Meanwhile I wonder if Scott Hanselman might convince Corillian to built a web service API into their banking platform?
Crazy Exotic Derivative of the Week #23 July 10, 2007
Posted by James Webster in : finance , add a commentOne of the bizarrest aspects of the world of derivatives is the wild names dreamt up for some of the products that are offered. For example, the magic potion passport option. A passport option is an option where the underlying instrument is the balance of an account used for securities trading. From the Global Derivatives website:
Beginning to sound like a computer game, we come across to magic potion passports - which enables investors to drink the magic potion and make part of his or her trading history disappear. For example, after 6 settlement periods, the investor thinks that erasing the history between periods 5 and 6 will improve their overall gain. These options can be useful for investors who do not have a tuned perception of the market, or beginners who are prone to mistakes.
Needless to say, you can expect the premium on passport options of all sorts to be very high. More on passport options here.