ConPA uses cloudnumbers.com as calculation backend

ConPA is an asset allocation application using the classic Markowitz approach. For the calculations the open-source statistical programming language R is used. R scripts are executed on cloudnumbers.com’s computer clusters in the Cloud and the results are displayed by ConPA frontend.

ConPA allows to set the investment date of the portfolio, the target return and the constraints for each asset. The result are the optimal weights of the assets and the portfolio performance, if the investment date is in the past. Furthermore, ConPA can retrieve the key statistics and calculate the implied volatility of the stocks.

• ConPA Welcome video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia_UVHtuBTM
• ConPA Tutorial video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIwbc6lQzNk

Imitating a well-known concept of the open source model, ConPA makes a transparent process: the user can reproduce the results by himself. To check the figures, the user can click on the script icon, close to the help icon, and an R script, corresponding to the optimal portfolio calculated, is displayed. It is the same script executed on cloudnumbers.com with the results displayed by ConPA frontend. The user can compare those results with the output of the script, running it, for instance, on a local R installation. De facto, an “Open Finance” paradigm.

cloudnumbers.com fits perfectly to ConPA, because it cuts the backend complexity and the development time.

Technical details:
At the beginning the asset allocation algorithm was ported to JavaScript from Fortran. Executing directly the same R script used to develop the algorithm is simpler: it avoids the porting mistakes and it reduces the development lifecycle.

The key component between cloudnumbers.com and Node.js instance, the backend framework ConPA is based on, is the module node-rio: it is an R serve adapter. It injects the R code in a remote instance of Rserve, running on cloudnumbers.com session. The session is configured with the following packages: RJSONIO, tseries, Rserve. The package tseries contains the implementation of mean-variance algorithm. The package RJSONIO serializes the inputs and the outputs of the script to a JSON format, a data format easy to handle for the JavaScript backend of ConPA. The package Rserve is configured to enable authenticated remote connections.

The roundtrip between ConPA frontend and cloudnumbers.com is straightforward: the frontend collects the user choices, the backend dispatches the request to cloudnumbers.com, retrieving the historical asset prices, calculating the optimal portfolio, finally the performance and returning the results.