How TAPPS Originated

The idea of having a technical analysis (TA) tool stretched back a long time for me, at least prior to 2008. Around 2007/2008, I started to toy with the idea of a combined financial asset manager and technical analysis tool, which I termed it as "Maurice Asset Manager (MAM)". That was when I was pretty much interested in TA. However, I had only wrote a few scripts, which did not collate into MAM. The last time that I made any changes to these scripts was 26th March 2008, based on my project archives.

In 2012, I had the chance to teach a statistics course to graduate students in South Dakota State University (Brookings, SD, USA). Then, I realized a lack of simple-to-use and economical statistical tool. I can list all available statistical tools on 2-axes of cost and ease of use.

• Costly and difficult to use, will be tools like SAS, which requires you to learn a command line language. This is not effective if you are really trying to do a few ANOVA tests.

• Costly but easy to use, will be tools like JMP, Minitab, and SPSS. The ease of use is by a click-and-drop graphical interface.

• Cheap but difficult to use, will be tools like R, and programming language-based statistical packages, like Python/pandas or Python/SciPy. R is a very powerful tool with lots of packages but learning the language can be difficult while Python/pandas or Python/SciPy basically requires you to be a Python programmer in the process.

• Cheap but easy to use... Sadly, I did not find any.

I had a discussion with some friends back then. including Yao Runan while we were lunching in university cafeteria. The concept was to create a tool to front-end R. This idea will be to create various click-and-drop graphical interface to write out the corresponding R commands to be executed in back-end. However, I was not sufficiently versed in R to do this and this idea got shelved.

On 5th November 2015, one of my friend, Trevor Yeo, asked me if I know of any good TA tools. I did not know any but this conversation triggered the idea of MAM within me. Since TA is essentially statistical analysis of time-series data, it can be folded into my incubated idea of a cheap and easy to use statistical tool. This got me thinking real hard and Trevor was tasked to seed a name for this new tool. He came up with "Technical Analysis Generation System (TAGS)" but I will like to have more statistical flavour in the name. Hence, I played around with TAGS to come up with TAAPPSS (Technical Analysis and Applied Statistics System) and dropped some repetitive letters to get "TAPPS".

TAPPS was borned and I started its implementation on 11th November 2015.