Annual subscriptions for Portfolio Probe are now available in addition to the one-off model. The prices are:

GBP: 5000 + VAT per year per concurrent user
EUR: 6250 + VAT per year per concurrent user
USD: 7500 per year per concurrent user

Portfolio Probe version 1.05 was released in late June.  It was primarily a bug-fix release (3 bugs), but included a couple of convenience enhancements as well.  Details are in the Change log: http://www.portfolioprobe.com/user-area/change-log/

pprobeData R package

There is now an R package called pprobeData.  This is fictionalized data that can be used for whatever purpose you like.  It has a matrix of daily prices over 6 years for 350 assets (equities).  It has the corresponding matrix of log returns, and it has a data frame of Country (totally made up) and Sector (real but disguised) categorizations of the assets.

To get the package do:

install.packages("pprobeData", repos="http://www.portfolioprobe.com/R")

or if you are not on Windows, you can do:

install.packages("pprobeData", type="source", repos="http://www.portfolioprobe.com/R").

Blog highlights

One of the most popular recent posts is a comparison of several heuristic (genetic algorithm, et cetera) optimization functions in R on a tiny portfolio optimization problem. Portfolio Probe does well, but the problem is too simplistic to really see the quality of the Portfolio Probe algorithm. The post is at: http://www.portfolioprobe.com/2012/07/23/a-comparison-of-some-heuristic-optimization-methods/

There was also a post that explains the difference between random portfolios (as generated in Portfolio Probe) and Monte Carlo (as usually thought of in financial planning).  That post is: http://www.portfolioprobe.com/2012/07/02/random-portfolios-versus-monte-carlo/

Some practical advice on garch modeling was given in: http://www.portfolioprobe.com/2012/07/06/a-practical-introduction-to-garch-modeling/

Thank you

Thank you for your interest in Portfolio Probe.