The power of slicing .... time to get to work with the felt marker on those pictures
Slicing is a powerful feature to help sophisticated users evaluate quotations and to
identify and exploit cyclic patterns. It is also slightly dangerous ..(a 'handle with care'
feature) that requires a fairly deep appreciation of the market and the issues around
financial returns computation. In proper deployment multiple slices must usually be
taken, and often repeated multiple times, and so slicing is only available through
subscription to the on-line dynamic UpicT tool site ... (coming your way soon!). If
you are interested in a subscription you can read about that aspect here
The user nominates a different opening-date, or different closing-date, or both, to
get a "slice". For all intents and purposes there are almost countless many such slices
that may be nominated, and so care must be exercised in choosing the slices to take,
that is, to make them meaningful. Starting with wider scoped slices, one may proceed
to hone in on areas of interest with more finely grained, more narrowly scoped, slices.
Because each slice has its own unique catchment of returns, and consequently its own
rate of returns, the slicing can be directed to identifying subsets of attractively positive
rates within mid-scoped sections whose return rates overall are quite flat. And, in the
case where those mid-scoped sections are repetitive, a cyclical pattern is identified and
may be pegged down for future application. Whereas in purely numerical theoretical
terms this monster of cyclic activity might never be practically located (the age old
problem of combinatorial explosion finally defeating the best efforts), when combined
with the visual heuristics of UpicT and the power of slicing, it becomes an exercise of
quite different dimensions, far more manageable dimensions. Best of all, the visual
aspects make it obvious when to abandon fruitless searches, which is just what the
purely numerical computations can probably never do no matter how good they may
be ..(otherwise known as the curious "Halting Problem" -- that is, the problem of
discovering when to halt a process that is going nowhere useful ... FAQ Q-11).
For more detail on slices you might like to read up on some of the usage hints given
on the hints page ....here.