Technology Challenges Facing the Industry .......................................................................................................................

2
Introducing UpTickXL .......................................................................................................................................................... 2
UpTickXL Use Cases ............................................................................................................................................................ 3
Reporting Consolidated Risk in Real Time ...................................................................................................................... 3
Developing Trading Systems Faster................................................................................................................................ 3
Sharing Market Intelligence ........................................................................................................................................... 3
Automating Intraday Reconciliations ............................................................................................................................. 4
Distributing Centralized Data ......................................................................................................................................... 4
Simplifying Critical Spreadsheets ................................................................................................................................... 4
Basic UpTickXL Add-In Usage .............................................................................................................................................. 5
Advanced UpTickXL Add-In Functionality ........................................................................................................................... 7
UpTickXL APIs...................................................................................................................................................................... 7
About UpTick Technology, LLC ........................................................................................................................................... 8

(version 20180420_1)
© 2018 UpTick Technology, LLC

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Like all industries, trading is ever more reliant on technology. Trading organizations must address a number of
systems-related challenges to remain competitive:
➢ Development resources are increasingly expensive and in short supply
➢ Trading systems development takes too long, resulting in large opportunity costs
➢ Basic and critical systems like global, real-time risk management and compliance monitoring are
inadequate or non-existent, exposing the firm to significant market, operational and regulatory risks
➢ Market intelligence is trapped in spreadsheets and underutilized
➢ Business processes in every corner of the firm are siloed, with operators relying on their own opaque and
unsupportable spreadsheets, creating costly redundancies and key-man risks

UpTickXL addresses the challenges listed above directly and efficiently.

UpTickXL is an Excel-integrated, persistent pub/sub messaging system enabling real-time and on demand
communication between globally dispersed instances of Excel and any number of other applications.
In short, UpTickXL turns Excel into a powerful, flexible thin client for distributed systems. It empowers domain
experts who already use Excel to quickly implement customized user interfaces; ones that interact securely and in
real time with any other systems and data sources, whether internal or external to the firm.
UpTickXL addresses systems-related challenges in the following ways:
➢ Effectively expands the pool of development resources by turning Excel-savvy operators into developers
of distributed, enterprise-grade applications
➢ Facilitates a highly effective, iterative development process for rapidly building systems supporting
mission-critical functions
➢ Turns any Excel user into a publisher of rich, real-time, globally-accessible content
➢ Standardizes the integration, distribution and consumption of information from internal and 3rd-party
applications and data sources
➢ Enables the creation of simple, supportable and highly functional spreadsheets; and simultaneously
enables the migration of critical business logic and data processing out of Excel
UpTickXL is engineered for security, constant uptime and to handle extreme loads with no visible latency.

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Below are just a few of the many ways UpTickXL can be deployed to quickly address systems challenges.

The partners need to see live, global, intraday risk. The risk manager is charged with making it happen.

The risk manager instructs each desk to publish its risk numbers to UpTickXL by placing a single method call
into its Excel sheets. He then creates a spreadsheet that receives all the desk-level data, consolidates it, and
publishes a global report all in real time. The project is completed within a day.

A quant trader has implemented an automated stat arb strategy in a Python server, but he lacks the skill to build a
robust user interface for configuration and monitoring.

The quant trader creates a simple spreadsheet for configuring and monitoring the strategy. He uses UpTickXL to
publish configurations from Excel to his Python server and to display activity reports published by the server. In
almost no time, the quant trader has built and integrated a highly customizable and user-friendly thin client for his
strategy.

A research analyst builds a spreadsheet with sophisticated market projections. He emails a detailed PDF each day,
but traders want to see updated projections as they trade. They also want to incorporate the information into their
trading algorithms in real time.

The research analyst uses UpTickXL to publish his projections automatically as they recalculate. It takes him five
seconds. The desks can now view the live projections either in Excel or in a browser, and they can
programmatically integrate the data into their trading systems with ease.

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A desk reconciles its position once each day by manually downloading a file from their clearing firm’s FTP site
and pasting the records into Excel. They want to reconcile throughout the day, but the manual process is too time-
consuming.

The desk builds a simple utility that downloads and parses the clearing file every ten minutes and publishes the
records to UpTickXL. They tweak their reconciliation spreadsheet to receive the data instantly when published.

Operations maintains a database containing reconciled trades, opening positions, settlements, MTM P&Ls,
brokerage and clearing fees, and other important information. Every trader wants to consume this data, but each
has different user interface requirements.

Operations builds a simple adapter that queries their database and publishes a series of reports for each desk to
UpTickXL. They permission the reports so that each trader can see only reports for his own desk.
Most traders use Excel to view their reports, leveraging Excel’s inherent flexibility and the powerful UpTickXL
data processing and workflow functions to create customized, interactive user interfaces. One trader retrieves his
reports programmatically via the UpTickXL API and displays it in a custom Web UI.

A trading desk critically relies on a massive Excel spreadsheet for live portfolio Greeks. The sheet is taking
increasingly long to recalculate and often freezes, leaving the desk uncertain of its position.

The clerk who maintains the sheet splits it into three simpler sheets: one for setting inputs, one for computing
Greeks, and one for displaying results. She uses UpTickXL to share data between the new sheets in real time.
The clerk immediately notices a big performance gain, but she wants further improvement. She works with a dev
to implement the Greek calculations in a Python server, which seamlessly replaces her calculation sheet.

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As seen in the following examples, simplicity was a primary design goal in developing UpTickXL.

Publishing data from Excel is as simple as entering a formula like the following into any cell (refer to screenshot
below):
=UPTICK.PUBLISH(D1,D2,C5:G15)
In this example, the current values of cells C5:G15 are being published as a report named “GREEKS” in the
report group “EQUITIES”. When any value in the range C5:G15 changes, the UPTICK.PUBLISH call in cell G1
automatically re-calculates and an updated report is published.
The UPTICK.PUBLISH call returns the current time when it calculates and therefore indicates the last time the
report was published. The size of the range published can be arbitrarily large.

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Another Excel user, running a different spreadsheet on a different machine, and possibly even located in a
different office, can retrieve the report published above by entering the following into any range of cells:
=UPTICK.GET(D1,D2)
Subscribing for live updates is just as easy:
=UPTICK.SUBSCRIBE(D1,D2)
UPTICK.SUBSCRIBE returns the fully qualified topic for the report. When subscribing, the UPTICK.GET call
references the cell containing UPTICK.SUBSCRIBE (refer to screenshot below), making the UPTICK.GET call
even simpler:
=UPTICK.GET(D4)
In this example, cell D4 contains the call to UPTICK.SUBSCRIBE and the range C5:G15 contains the call to
UPTICK.GET (entered as an Excel array formula), which now automatically updates to show the latest data
whenever the report is published.

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In addition to robust data integration, the UpTickXL Add-In provides a rich array of functionality for increasing
productivity and decreasing operational risk by making spreadsheets simpler, more functional and more efficient:
➢ Powerful, VBA-killing data processing and workflow functions
➢ Automatic capture of daily snapshots of data
➢ Path-dependent event configuration and evaluation
➢ Custom notifications from Excel via email, text messaging and sound
➢ Concurrent updating of data ranges by distributed users
➢ Auto-launching of any number of spreadsheets in remembered screen locations
➢ Remote control of spreadsheets running in other Excel instances
➢ Computationally efficient alternatives to native Excel methods
➢ Rich date and time parsing and conversion
➢ Much, much more…

UpTickXL exposes a variety of APIs in popular languages to enable rapid integration with any external system or
data source. UpTickXL APIs help firms to more effectively leverage data assets by making any data instantly
available to Excel users. UpTickXL APIs also allow critical and heavy processing to be migrated out of Excel and
into server-side applications, and they enable using Excel as a thin client in any distributed enterprise application.
This code sample illustrates how easy it is to publish data to UpTickXL using the UpTickXL Python API. The
EQUITIES/GREEKS report published here is immediately available to all Excel users and integrated apps:
# get_my_greeks is any custom method that returns a matrix of data
client = UpTickXLClient()
client.publish('EQUITIES/GREEKS', get_my_greeks())

Receiving data published by Excel or other applications in real time is just as simple:
# my_update_handler will be called whenever EQUITIES/GREEK_INPUTS is published
client = UpTickXLClient(message_callback=my_update_handler)
client.subscribe('EQUITIES/GREEK_INPUTS')

def my_update_handler(report):
# process the EQUITIES/GREEK_INPUTS report here

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UpTick Technology, LLC (“UpTick”) is a provider of real-time, Excel-integrated solutions to the trading
industry. UpTick personnel have decades of experience both trading and building mission-critical systems for
trading operations of all sizes. In early 2017 UpTick released its flagship product, UpTickXL.
UpTick is developing a number of applications that extend UpTickXL with rich functionality for traders, risk
managers, compliance officers and operations personnel. UpTick also offers consulting services related to
UpTickXL component development and integration with proprietary and 3rd-party systems.

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