Project Inception

Alpha Architect approached us with the idea of building a tool with the following features:

• A scatterplot that shows the factors of individual equities held by ETFs
• An ETF screening and ranking tool
• A radar and bar chart comparing averaged factors of different ETFs
• Factor and trend analysis of individual stocks
• The ability to create portfolios and ETFs, and have instant factor analysis performed on such portfolios

They requested that we take the project from start to finish, handling everything from the design of the user interface, to provisioning the cloud infrastructure. We quoted them a fixed cost, and estimated that the tool would take 8 months to build.

The Work

We showed the work in progress to Alpha Architect periodically after each major feature was completed. AA gave feedback, and sometimes requested additional features which lengthened the development cycle. We quoted fixed costs for each additional feature.

The initial version of the tool launched 10 months after project commencement. We had implemented all requested features, and deployed them onto Google cloud. We provided unlimited support for bug fixes, which we were happy to provide since we knew there weren’t many bugs in the code.

AA followed up with several minor features, which we provided them with. Although they decided to take the tool down for business reasons, we remain in good relationship to this day.