Tips and Tricks

Here are a few tips and tricks to maximize the power of ANNI and your chances of success.

Basic Investing Tips

First and foremost - never invest without doing some research in multiple areas of the security. People who blindly invest in the stock market will quickly fall victim to the pitfalls of investing. Do not rely on a single source. Look at the financial foundation of the security in which you are interested. Taking a small amount of time to do this can pay off big when it keeps you from taking a blind leap of faith into a potentially bad investment. ANNI provides a quick link to the internet (requires internet connection) for your currently opened security which allows you to do more extensive research and increase your odds of success.
Second biggest tip that cannot be stressed enough is to diversify. Diversifying your assets will help protect you against a potential large drop in your total portfolio value if all your eggs were in one basket. Diversifying greatly increases your chance of success over the long haul. Diversifying does not mean having twenty stocks in the one sector - when the .com bubble burst, the entire tech sector fell. Diversifying means spreading out your investments between several different sectors and even investment types. ANNI provides a useful utility, the 'Probability of Success', which allows you to place in several key factors to produce exact figures as to how much to invest in each security you own (or about to own) to guarantee the highest possibility of success. There are also many online portfolio diversifying tools on the Internet. Check out etrade.com for some of their online tools.

Basic ANNI Tips

ANNI should be run all the time. ANNI has built in support to allow ANNI to start up your favorite ANNI File or Batch File and begin running as soon as you start Windows. Now you can be assured you'll remember to train all the time. In addition the latest version now supports CPU throttling which provides a means to prevent 100% CPU usage. This is a great feature for laptop users that don't want their laptops overheating.
Learn to use ANNI's Portfolio Groups. Portfolio Groups are an effective way to manage large portfolios of modeled securities. Portfolio Groups allow individual management of a group of stocks. This includes news, advanced graphs, training times, performance and output logs for each security.
For faster training make sure you have the following options selected in
"Edit->Configurations->Program Settings":
1. No Text Output
2. No Updates
3. Hide When Minimized
Then minimize ANNI while training. This puts ANNI in a special optimized training mode that reduces the time to train by eliminating many updates to the views that would have normally occurred (since ANNI is not visible when minimized, updates are not necessary in this mode).
There is a lot of mouse integration throughout ANNI. Try clicking your right mouse button to see what options come up depending on where you are. Also in the Prediction and Trade System Graphs, there is further left mouse button features as well.
Most Advanced Prediction System views can be left up when accessing another view by clicking on the upper right corners pushpin (relative to the view). Closing the view will snap it back in place (or delete it all together if you do not currently have that view selected in the navigation pane).
If you ever need help with something or would like to learn more about it, just push the F1 key for immediate assistance. The help contain more than just information about the program. It contains useful tips to make full use of ANNI as well as the basics. Check it out.

Advanced ANNI Tips

If you have access to a network of computers, you can setup multiple computers to train on the same group of files. First create a shared folder were all ANNI files will be located. Then set up the newly shared folder under the same drive letter for all computers accessing the files (use the same drive letter as the hosting computer if the hosting computer will be accessing the files also). Create a Portfolio file for each group of files that you want all computers to train on. Then when you open the Portfolio file, select a file that is a few files out of sync with the rest of the computers running the same Portfolio file. This way all the computers can work through each of the files without stepping on each other. You can increase your computing power by the amount of all computers accessing the files limited only by total number of files vs. total number of computers.
For the ultimate analysis on one stock, set up multiple files of the same stock but choose different Intraday Intervals and/or different training parameters. Add all of these files to a single Portfolio (possibly split up via Portfolio Groups). Train as normal and compare the outlook of all the different files. This approach adds a new dimension to your research since each file will be viewing the data at a different level. If you see the majority of all the files agree, you have a much greater chance of it occurring.
Run the Cross Correlation Analysis (a Professional only feature) on an entire directory. Make sure you select yes to export the results. Open the results in Excel (or similar spreadsheet type program) and take a group decision of the top correlated securities for a final output. This provides a robust approach to the use of the Cross Correlation Analysis beyond what a single analysis can provide.

Custom Data Files

Find information about Custom Data Files here.

Hidden Features

Find information about Hidden Features here. Note that hidden features are features that have been created for one purpose or another and are not currently exposed to the public. This means they are not supported features and that any use of these features are not guaranteed to work. Use of these features means you understand and accept these terms. Of course any feedback you would like to provide regarding the Hidden Features would be greatly appreciated since they could eventually be cleaned up and exposed to the public.

ANNI is available to download and try out for free, unrestricted, for 21 days. Simply visit the download page to obtain a copy.

Last modified: Sunday, June 24, 2007