Imagine you’re a trader working on a number of different analyses of the energy market every day. Part of your analyses involves the creation of forward curves, before pushing them onto a database and using them in a downstream system. A lot of the job involves copying and pasting content from one spreadsheet to another – unfortunately the software you’re using doesn’t know how to prepare, validate or automate the data before the creation of the forward curves takes place.
Undoubtedly you know the room for human error is immense. All that information and data must be carefully copied and pasted from one section to another before sending it onto a downstream system. In order to ensure that everything is done correctly, you need to slow down, check and double-check your data, and then take a deep breath and transfer it over.
Or you could choose to avoid all of this.
Recently at ZE PowerGroup we launched our latest ‘cool tool’ called Curve Portal. Curve Portal is a data entry tool that allows you to enter and upload your daily marks using Microsoft Excel and then forward them onto your downstream system. As a feature of our ZEMA Suite’s popular Microsoft Excel add-in tool Data Direct, it combines the functionalities of Microsoft Excel and the power of ZEMA to create a unique product that can download and upload data.
Why Use Curve Portal?
Using Curve Portal you can generate new values, copy previous days or simply make minor adjustments. In addition, you can also view multiple curves or single curves across time, viewing day-by-day comparisons of the values generated.
You can also manage who accesses the data. Curve Portal is permission-based, meaning administrators can keep track of which users upload or download specific curves. All changes are uploaded onto the powerful ZEMA workflow system Curve Manager and the data is then made available across the entire ZEMA system, flowing automatically to predefined downstream systems.
Curve Portal also leverages new entities in Curve Manager called ‘external curves’, which are empty curves that are populated by the Microsoft Excel add-in or other web services. This allows you to access the functionalities of Microsoft Excel such as pivot tables and formulas. You can also have user Macros and VBA functionality to add even more sophisticated proceesses to your integration. The best part of it all is that these external curves can be used to create other curves and will be available in Market Analyzer. Just like Curve Manager, all changes are tracked with notes and have a full revision history.
There’s no doubting that Microsoft Excel is a great product for working with data. It’s a familiar tool for most users such as traders and analysts. By using the ZEMA Suite and the Curve portal Excel Add-In, you can continue to prepare your data in a multiple different Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, compare them and get multiple different queries on the data, all at the same time.
ZEMA’s Curve Portal Capabilities Include:
- Embed curve data into MS Excel and allow collaboration in organization through Excel
- Simple data wizard
- Real-time and historical data
- Simple upload functionality
- Use in-cell formulas and pivot tables
- Control user access to curves based on particular permission and underlying data permissions
- Ability to search for profile and external curves in Curve manager
- Download multiple curves at once
- No database work required to upload data
- Ability to work with multiple curve on one business day or work with one curve across multiple days
- Ability to edit, create new or copy curve from previous date
- Dependent curves will build automatically upon upload of curve data
- Ability to view curve history
- Supports SSO and LDA