TRADER: an expert system for trading commodities futures

An expert system is described, written in PROLOG, for trading commodities futures. The system uses a blackboard architecture to develop a set of confidence factors for buying and selling futures. It also has an elaborate user interface, which displays the technical studies that its decisions are based on in graphical form and provides feedback to the user on its decisions. This interface played a major role in the knowledge acquisition phase of the project. The program is a real-time system using tick data provided by Tick Data Inc. of Chicago, IL. It has been extensively tested on historical data with encouraging results; the authors are refining the confidence factor computation and adding a training aspect to the program