Polly Portfolio is an automated investment platform that provides individual investors with professional-grade tools and institutional experience to build customized portfolios
Polly Portfolio enables personalized financial planning and management through the services described below:
- Polly Analytics — a free analytical tool that allows users to combine a state-of-the-art institutional investment process with their own investing insights
- Managed Accounts — a portal for opening and management of an investment account at a third-party custodian
- Paper Accounts — a simulated account allowing users can track performance of their portfolio as it responds to data, markets and their own outlooks
Astea developed Polly Portfolio’s web-based platform, bringing the power of Polly’s hedge fund-grade investment engine to the hands of individual consumers. The system crunches massive amounts of historical market data and builds a statistical model of the markets that can recommend an investment portfolio to a user tailored to her stated outlooks on world economics.
Some of the mathematical and engineering challenges solved by Astea include:
- Creating a super-fast lightweight approximation of the “heavy” professional-grade model to allow the user to see in real time how changes to her outlook impact her recommended portfolio. This was achieved via statistical tools such as regression analysis and interpolation.
- Utilizing advanced data visualization techniques to present all kinds of financial and market data to the user. The goal is to educate the user about a recommended investment and make him feel that he is in control of his finances. The visualization needs to be accurate, but at the same time sufficiently simple and intuitive so that anyone can understand it. Visualized data includes:
- historical market data
- structure and distribution of projected returns
- risk profile
- recommended portfolio structure
