FAQ
A. Yes, as this is essentially a custom Toolkit, at the moment your organisation needs a developer license in order to install it and run in production.
A. Unfortunately not, but please contact your sales rep and ask them about them supporting third party Toolkits without requiring a full developer license.
A. Unfortunately not. Integration Services doesn't offer a real-time streaming API that re-calculates with each tick of the market. The other reason is in order to be compliant with market data licensing (each trader has potentially different exchange permissions) the numbers need to be streamed from software where this logic is handled correctly. In all that means Toolkit has to be used at this moment.
A. Not at all. This is a very lightweight Excel add-in that just receives streaming data from your FusionInvest client. All of the heavy calculations are still done entirely by the client.
A. No. I promise it will not crash your Excel. We love Excel and will always treat Excel with the respect it deserves.
A. Not at all. The underlying technology is the RTD functionality that has been in Excel since 2002. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/289150/how-to-set-up-and-use-the-rtd-function-in-excel. The RTD Excel interface is used widely across the financial industry and in particular on trading desks. It's the exact same technology Bloomberg uses to implement BDP real time streaming.
A. This depends. The process of streaming the numbers out of the FusionInvest client takes very little time. In our testing of several thousand data points, streaming takes under a second when the client performs a consolidation or calculation. FusionLink also needs to perform a compute (F9) of all portfolios that are subscribed to in Excel via the Get Portfolio Value or Get Position Value whether or not they are currently displayed on the screen. The impact on your FusionInvest client entirely depends on your portfolios. There are ways to optimize this using the Automatic Preference computing options. See Refresh Options for further details.
A. Bloomberg BDP for FusionInvest portfolio data.
A. Hopefully one day yes. At the moment the API's required are not exposed but we are watching the developments in the FusinFabric.cloud space closely.
A. None. All calculations are performed by FusionInvest and the results simply streamed to excel.
A. No. FusionLink hooks into the core calculation engine and retrieves the values from there. If also detects an F9 calculation and will perform the F9 on all portfolios currently not displayed as well.
A. Yes. FusionInvest works entirely in the FusionInvest client so in order to see numbers in Excel, FusionInvest needs to be loaded.
A. No. On-demand functions need to be re-run to see refreshed results.
A. At the moment only Excel 2016 has been tested, however the Excel-DNA project which the Excel add in is based should support all versions from Excel 2007 and above.
A. Both the Xll client and the Toolkit require .net 4.7.2.
A. Absolutely, by using the FusionLink Xll, there are no restrictions placed upon Excel. All the functionality of Excel is still 100% available for you to use.
A. In order for FusionLink to identify a position in the system it requires a MVTIDENT to use as the position reference. For cash positions before 7.2 these identifiers were generated at runtime so it isn't possible. After 7.2, cash positions are given a real MVTIDENT so subscriptions are possible. For virtual FX positions these identifiers are still generated at run-time so subscriptions are not possible.
A. Yes. The FusionInvest client is still processing events in real-time and FusionLink is able to stream those values out to Excel.
A. Yes with a problem. Async user columns are calculated after the consolidation has been performed which is when FusionLink grabs the data. This means that the value sent to Excel is always one calculation behind. If your position is on fast moving market data this may not be an issue for you however you'll need to review your use case.
Please see Running FusionLink in Citrix / RemoteApps / Terminal Services
A. The data streamed to Excel is the exact same data from your FusionInvest client so the data will also be historical. Please see the Get Portfolio Date function that will change automatically with the date of your system. You can then setup conditional formatting rules in Excel to highlight if you are not looking at live numbers.
The communication between Excel and FusionInvest / FusionCapital only works on the same machine due to data licensing restrictions. If you are running FusionInvest / FusionCapital via Citrix / RemoteApp, Excel must be running on the same server.
