Articles covering the technological (server, infrastructure, etc) and technical (calculation, formulas and reasoning behind them, etc) aspects of StocksCafe
Slow-loading Pages If you have been using StocksCafe for the last few days, you might have experienced extremely slow loading of some of the pages on desktop. I apologize for the poor experience. It is likely due to the auto-completion feature (suggesting stocks as you type) that is available on some pages such as this and this. It is the combination of poor design of the auto-complete feature...
I just realized that it has been almost a month since I last wrote in here! I wanted to drop a quick note so that people know that StocksCafe is still in active development 🙂 Apart from all the bug fixes and touch ups here and there, I have been spending most of my energy on upgrading the infrastructure of StocksCafe. Previously, everything about StocksCafe is basically packed into one server. As...
I realized that I did not post any article for the whole of June. It is due to a combination of various reasons but the main reason was that I tried switching to a new caching system (i.e. Redis) for StocksCafe thinking that it is better. However, due to my lack of experience with it, it instead made StocksCafe unstable. Causing out of memory issues, displaying stale data, etc. These resulted in...
This is to inform you that it is likely that there will be a period of downtime for StocksCafe this weekend. It might become inaccessible as I proceed to migrate away from my current hosting provider, DigitalOcean. Thank you for your understanding. Note: You can stop reading here if you have no intention of using hosting services. The following is written because DigitalOcean has pissed me off...
Recently, I have changed how the “P&L + Dividends + Closed” percentage was computed, from being based on “Current Cost” to “Total Cost” (read more about it in this article). However, several users have reached out and suggested that to base the “P&L + Dividends + Closed” percentage on “Total Cost” would penalize users who trade...
All along, I have naively displayed “Last Traded Price” and used it for all computations in StocksCafe without much consideration. That is until recently, when a user brought to my attention the difference between “Last Traded Price” and “Close Price”. This led me to spend time learning about it and ultimately switch to using “Close Price” in...
Wrong Total Cost Recently, a user highlighted that Total Cost in StocksCafe was computed wrongly and he (I assumed it’s a he based on the username) is correct. I previously computed Total Cost as “Sum of [buy price x number of shares] for each stock currently in portfolio”. However, this is inaccurate as he has pointed out, and I agree. Therefore I have changed the definitions...
Since the drastic move to re-architecture StocksCafe and adding support for two new markets at the same time in April, StocksCafe website have became slower. I am aware of that and have been taking significant amount of time trying to improve it. To be very honest, I am not 100% sure what is the true cause although I am inclined to think that it is due to a summation of reasons such as poor...
Like many others, I enjoy buying stocks that pay good dividends. The challenge is in identifying companies that will be able to pay good dividends year after year. Many might suggest reading through years of financial statements, as well as getting to know the top management and their vision for the company as it is the ideal way of projecting its future cashflow and thus, dividends. I do agree...
In the previous article, I looked at how Debt-to-equity and Operating Cashflow (referred to as DER and OC from hereon) would influence Dividend Per Share (DPS). In particular, I looked at see how change of DER and change of OC in year X influences the DPS in year X+1. In this article, I would like to focus on the how absolute DER and absolute OC in year X could be a predictor of DPS in year X+1...
I believe there are many investors like me who love to invest in companies that pay dividends. Naturally, we hope that companies we invest in would have growing dividends. So, the question is “How can we differentiate companies that will have growing dividends from others?” In an attempt to find an answer to this question, I will perform a series of analyses in this and upcoming...
