The campaign for the UK’s general election is getting started in earnest; on 6 May, people will vote to determine the next national government. A model called VIPA that we’ve built in Resolver One gives what we think is a more accurate forecast than the traditional methods, and the Register has published a great explanation of its advantages.

Built by Resolver Systems director Robert Smithson, the son of political betting expert Mike Smithson, the model uses the new more-detailed data available in recent polls to predict who will win. Robert explains: “Existing election forecasts in the UK often use techniques based on a Uniform National Swing that was developed in the 1950s, when Labour and the Conservatives took 95% of the vote. Yet these do not take in account the rise of effective third parties in different parts of the country. The VIPA model is designed to accurately model voters ’switching’ from one party to another, providing a much more accurate forecast for modern elections.”

You can read more about VIPA on our Election 2010 page.

We have had a number of queries about whether QuantLib works in Resolver One. QuantLib is “a free/open-source library for modeling, trading, and risk management in real-life.” We thought it would be great if we could confirm that it works with Resolver One. The short answer is: “It does!”.

Since a build of QuantLib and the .Net bindings can take most of a day (the bulk of it waiting for builds to complete), we decided to provide pre-built binaries and an example so our customers can try it out immediately.

Interested in election forecasting, British politics, or just in large-scale Resolver One spreadsheets doing something interesting?  Resolver Systems co-founder Robert Smithson has created a powerful spreadsheet to predict the results of the next UK national elections, and you can download it from here.

One of the primary goals of Resolver One is to enable you to create complex applications with a wide range of functionality through the traditional spreadsheet interface. Due to the background of the founders of Resolver Systems many of our early users were in the financial industry, but Resolver One is now being used in many different industries.

Perhaps in homage to its roots in finance, one of the entries to the Resolver One Spreadsheet Challenge, and the third spreadsheet we are looking at in this series of blog entries,  is a spreadsheet application for Stock Trading and Portfolio Analysis. It is the creation of the winner of one of the earlier competition rounds, Siamak Faridani.

• Stock Trading and Portfolio Analysis spreadsheet

Resolver One is a “mash-up” of a spreadsheet and an IDE -Wikipedia

Resolver One is supposed to be more powerful than a spreadsheet and more flexible than an IDE. In this entry we demonstrate how a sophisticated trading software can be developed in Resolver One quickly.

It can generate candlesticks, finance bars, and line plot. It simulates the value at risk with two methods. And can be connected to R for portfolio optimization.

There are many impressive things about this spreadsheet, not least of which is the PDF documentation that comes with it. The main dashboard, part of which is shown below, allows you to create a portfolio consisting of positions in several stocks, and then perform a range of calculations or present information about the portfolio. Calculations include the rate of return and Value at Risk analysis.

Once you have created your portfolio historical price data is fetched for all of the stocks from google finance. If you have the Resolver One Financial Data Feeds enabled then it would be easy, and faster, to use Bloomberg or Thomson to get this historical data. Price data is put into new worksheets, created and formatted from code, for each stock. The one improvement I would make is to cache these results, using a Cached Worksheet, to avoid having to refetch them every time the spreadsheet is recalculated.

The spreadsheet is capable of generating a variety of different charts for the portfolios it manages. The image below is a pie chart representing the whole portfolio.

This is a data plot (a candlestick visualization) for one of the stocks; Google Incorporated in this particular case.

The spreadsheet has several other nice features, including the ability to fetch recent financial news relevant to the portfolio or take you to the google finance and bloomberg pages for individual stocks. This is definitely fun to play with and a good example of some of the things you can achieve when you combine the spreadsheet interface with complex user coded functionality.

Spreadsheets get used for a lot of things; in fact they get used for just about everything, which is part of the raison d’être of Resolver One. One of the slightly unusual uses for spreadsheets is for testing. The style of testing called FitNesse allows non-technical users to write acceptance tests for applications with tables of input data and expected output data. These test tables are ideally suited to being created using spreadsheets.

We haven’t heard of anyone using Resolver One for creating FitNesse test tables, but it is easy to integrate with external tools and libraries. One of the spreadsheets submitted in the last round of the spreadsheet challenge, and the second that we are looking at in our series, automates browsers for testing purposes.

• Resolver One and WatiN – Web page automation and testing

Common tools for testing web applications include Selenium and Windmill. They allow you to automate browsers, simulate user actions and then check that the right results are displayed. WatiN is another tool for automating browsers and it comes in the form of a .NET library. Greg Bray has integrated this with Resolver One, allowing you to drive Internet Explorer from a spreadsheet table. His spreadsheet performs searches with Google, Bing and Yahoo and extracts the number of results from each search engine.

The screenshot below shows the results table after performing the search:

Bing seems to report rather a lot of results for “Resolver One”! This example application, which you can download from the Resolver Exchange, includes the WatiN binaries and documentation:

This is a simple example of how to use the new WatiN 2.0 library in Resolver One. WatiN can be used to automate testing of webpages in Internet Explorer, and version 2.0 has partial support for Google Chrome and Firefox.

You basically use WatiN to create a script of what you want to do on a webpage (ie: click, type, browse to…). This example takes a list of search terms and compares how many results are provided by Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

This is a simple task, but WatiN can be used for much more advanced automation on complex sites even including AJAX webpages. For a more complex example, see this link for an IronPython script that downloads a list of incoming and outgoing call data from the Vonage website.

The example would be a good base to build web application tests by creating a table of actions and a corresponding table of results. By hiding the code pane, or using the Resolver One Player available with version 1.6, you could even define the interactions in code and have customers specify the tests.

For more ideas for testing with Resolver One we suggest reading Creating Test Tables and browsing the Resolver Exchange.