The document discusses a financial management application called clearTREND created by The Appleton Group for investors. It automated their proprietary trading methodology based on simple moving averages for ETFs by capturing market data and performing calculations to provide trade recommendations. Hosting clearTREND on Microsoft Azure provides the benefits of low cost, high flexibility, and 99.5% uptime. This has allowed Appleton Group to launch new portfolio strategies, grow their business, and expand into new client and market segments.

1. SKYLINETECHNOLOGIES.COM (920) 437.1360 n (262) 522.8081
THE CHALLENGE
The Appleton Group, an independent Registered
Investment Advisor developed a proprietary trading
methodology based on simple moving averages for
Exchange Traded Funds (ETF). They used a series of
spreadsheets to manually track fund data and perform
calculations allowing them to determine a recommended
trading strategy for individual ETFs.
Appleton Group wanted to build a financial management
application for all types of investors where the tool provides
the greatest insight into a managed philosophy based on
years of experience and market trends.
THE APPLETON GROUP
Changing the Way the World Invests
The clearTREND®
app automated the process of capturing current and historical data for the ETFs Appleton Group
wanted to analyze and/or trade. The application replaced the existing manual spreadsheets they used to track the
data, drastically reducing the amount of time and work involved.
clearTREND is an investment research app that helps keep your portfolio on the right side of the market.
Available for both desktop and mobile devices, clearTREND analyzes price movements for a nearly endless
number of investment securities including ETFs, mutual funds, individual stocks and market indexes. clearTREND
calculates which time periods are best to consider when making investment decisions, and recommends timely
adjustments to your investments when those trends have turned.
After each trading day, clearTREND pulls the latest market data from Xignite – a leading provider of market data
cloud solutions – for the securities being tracked and applies Appleton Group’s patent pending formula to the
latest data to provide users with trade recommendations.
clearTREND works to significantly reduce the investment risk associated with investing. Appleton Group’s
measured portfolio risk is 45.2% less than a typical “buy and hold” unmanaged investment strategy and their
success rate in generating profits per trade is 68.2%.
To learn more about clearTREND visit www.cleartrendresearch.com. To learn more about The Appleton Group
visit www.appletongrouponline.com.
THE SOLUTION
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2. THE BENEFITS
Azure is Cost Effective
Hosting in Azure provides the ability
to rapidly scale in any direction, up
or down, making capacity a non-
issue. Deploying across six Azure
instances gives Appleton Group high
flexibility, yet maintains a low over-
head cost. By using redundant in-
stances for each of the roles we can
ensure 99.5% uptime for clearTREND.
Using Azure Marketplace to make
clearTREND commercially available
allowed Appleton Group to go to
market without adding additional
infrastructure or staff. Azure Market-
place handles the e-commerce
aspects of the product like credit
card processing, PCI compliance and
account management so Appleton
Group can focus resources on
value-added clearTREND features.
Business Growth
Appleton Group wanted to expand
their service offerings and launch
new portfolio strategies. With the
addition of clearTREND they were
able to launch eight new portfolio
strategies in one year without adding
any staff. Without clearTREND, they
would have had to double their
research and trading staff to
facilitate this growth.
In it’s first year, clearTREND
contributed to business growth by:
• Increasing account advisory
revenue by 19%
• Contributing $11.4 million in total
investment gains
• Bringing in $4.8 million in assets
from new clients
• Decreasing measured portfolio
risk by 45.2% over a typical “buy
and hold” unmanaged investment
strategy.
New Clients and Markets
Appleton Group has identified three
additional markets beyond their
existing private clients.
1. B2C – Individual investors who
manage their own investments and
understand the value of research
tools to make fact-based investment
decisions
2. B2B Financial Institutions – Mutual
fund managers and investment firms
who are looking for better research
engines to add to their decision-
making toolkits.
3. B2B – Any organization interested
in the optimal trends of key indices
like petroleum, corn, or gold. Many
commodities can be extremely
volatile. An understanding the opti-
mal trends and when to buy could be
highly beneficial to the bottom line.
SKYLINETECHNOLOGIES.COM (920) 437.1360 n (262) 522.8081
The desktop version of clearTREND is a Silverlight-based web application developed in C#/XAML. The Windows 8
app is the mobile version of the desktop app.
clearTREND is hosted entirely in Microsoft Azure. It is deployed across one web role and two worker roles, each
running on redundant instances of Windows Azure (six total instances). The web role is responsible for delivering
the Silverlight 5.0 user interface that provides visuals for trend analysis with the ability to drill down and further
analyze data. The web role is running on two redundant medium instances. Deploying the web role separately from
backend functionality allows us to scale the clearTREND frontend based on the number and frequency of users.
Azure Marketplace is used for subscription management.
THE TECHNOLOGY
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