Advanced financial market visualization to improve decision making and risk perception

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Today's financial markets are increasingly more automated, more data-intensive, and more risk sensitive. Recent events have shown the vulnerability of financial markets to technical disturbances, resulting in rapid and dramatic losses of equity. At an even larger scale, the inability of financial institutions to fully appreciate their exposure to risk in financial products and vulnerability to changing economic conditions has led to weakness in the Canadian and global economies as a whole. This proposal presents a collaborative research and development teaming between Cyborg Trading Systems (CTS), a leading Canadian financial technology company and Dr. Burns of the University of Waterloo, a world expert in the design of visualizations for decision making in complex environments. We propose to take a systematic approach to understanding financial risk, taking advantage of automated financial analytics developed at CTS, to develop innovative visualizations to improve financial decision making. This research will result in concrete improvements in financial tools for leading Canadian financial institutions, an improvement in CTS's product line, a scientific contribution to the understanding of how people work in highly uncertain risk environments, and a methodological improvement to the Cognitive Work Analysis framework, which has not been applied to this kind of domain before. This collaborative research project will train 12 students from the undergraduate level to the PhD level in financial technologies, visualization design, and user experience design. The contribution of this research to the partner company, CTS, will make a competitive improvement to their product line. This research will contribute to innovation within the Canadian financial services industry as a whole.