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1. What is this? This is a what we call a Xot. A Xot is a collection of related things that have lots of good metadata, plus a good user interface for searching, filtering, sorting, etc. This Xot specifically searches Municipal Bond (MUNI) closed-end funds (CEFs). We would like to eventually bring other Xots online to search other things. MUNI CEFs can be good investments, in our opinion, because they pay regular dividends that are tax free. But they entail some devious risks like high AMT, dropping dividends, high expenses, etc. Your mileage will vary! This site was built out of the frustration we at Changing Bits have had when trying to find a good MUNI CEF to invest in. With the great many (far too many, really) existing tools out there, it was still difficult to narrow down the choices. We really wanted a simple yet powerful interface that would let us pick arbitrary metadata about these funds, filter by them, sort by them, etc. all in a single place. We couldn't find a single tool out there that did all of this, for free. So we built this.
We first came online on July 30, 2006 and have been iterating since.
2. Are there any other Xots? Not just yet. But, not for lack of frustration! Really, for lack of time (this is just a hobby for us). We are thinking about other Xots and as always welcome your ideas.
Every time we need to make a challenging purchase (new camera, new
car, new house, etc.) or find anything online, we are frustrated by
the absurd limitations of the existing search tools. We would like to
(gradually) change this by bringing new Xots online, and to make this
a free service that anyone can use.
3. What can I do with it? Lots of things. Switch to edit mode to add attributes, change the column order, etc. Save your good searches so you can re-use them later. Better yet, save these searches as "shared" so others can use them and extend them, too. Here are some of the more interesting saved and shared searches (in our opinion): One important thing to do is observe trends and try to understand them. For example, why do nearly all high quality MUNI CEFs trade at discount? Or, why has the vast majority dropped their dividends recently? Why is it that the funds that seem to pay large end of year capital gains tend to be the high quality or insured funds? We don't know the answers to these questions. Indeed, this Xot has opened more questions than it has answered for us (thus making it harder to pick one!).4. Where is the rest of the web site?
There is nothing else! Really. At least not yet. We don't have time
to build out a whole web site. We just wanted to make this Xot
available as soon as possible. We will evolve the Xot and the web
site iteratively as the needs arise. Everything necessarily starts
small. Design for
today!
5. What's edit mode vs search mode? Many people find this confusing. Please send us ideas on how to simplify this!
You can switch between edit mode and search mode for the same search,
without changing your search. Edit mode just adds a number of
additional controls that let you do more drastic changes:
adding/removing attributes, adding filters or changing their order,
changing order of attributes, setting preferences like short/long
names or staggered column headers. Then you can switch back to search
mode to resume a normal search experience.
6. It's too complicated to use! We agree, for a non-power user this is still daunting. We're not sure how to fix that though.
We have tried hard to make powerful functions available, to do things
we found missing in other tools we've tried. For example, filtering
with counts, sorting, picking attributes, etc. All this, while
keeping the UI as simple as possible. Inevitably, when confronted
with the hard choice of removing an important feature or accepting a
more complex UI, we always choose to keep the important feature at the
expense of a more complex UI. Albert Einstein said "always make
things as simple as possible, but no simpler" and this is what we try
for. If you have ideas on how we could make the interface simpler,
more intuitive, consistent, etc., please let us know.
7. It can't do XYZ that this other awesome tool can do!
We know the xotana.com user interface doesn't do everything. There
are a great many stock screeners out there that all have different
strengths and weaknesses. We have tried to strike a balance of
including powerful functions while still providing a highly usable,
intuitive experience. This tradeoff is not easy as these needs are
frequently complete opposites. However, we really want to evolve the
user intervace to a more complete, useful experience, so if you have
ideas on some function or feature that we're missing, please let us know.
8. I don't see all choices in the filters! If you've edited your search to show filters under the column headers (not on the left), then, first, you have to click the pencil icon next to each column name to see the filter options in the dropbox on that column. Click the pencil icon again to hide them.
The filters at all times show you only choices that will in fact have
results. This means you won't see all choices. For example, if you
are already filtering to "No Leverage" and "Avg Quality > AA", you
will not see a filter for the higher yields because these funds
generally don't have higher yields. If you remove those filters, then
the higher yield filter brackets will become available.
9. How is this built? This site is a LAMP application where the P stands for Python (the better of the two P's, of course). It uses Apache's mod_python. The attributes are updated nightly into a MySQL database. Then Python is used to present the user interface allowing you to interact with the data in MySQL. We have tried hard to keep the URLs very short (as a result, they are cryptic) to make them easier to bookmark, share by email, copy/paste, etc.
We'd like to thank the folks at WebFaction, our hosting provider,
for making it so simple to bring a Python based web site online.
We've used other hosting providers in the past that do not make a
persistent Python interpreter available unless you spend a lot of $$$
for a dedicated server, so it's awesome to find WebFaction with such excellent
functionality for a fair price.
10. How reliable is it?
This is a very new site that's still in beta. It is also just a
hobby, so we don't have tons of time for it. There are undoubtedly
bugs. If you find one, please drop us a note so we know
about it and can fix it. Your mileage will vary!
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