The case study is about a Financial Trading (FT) enterprise called TechRules Advisors (TRA Inc.), a fictitious asset management firm (© Said Tabet and Gerd Wagner). The firm buys and sells numbers of shares of securities and manages its clients' assets. Portfolio managers create and manage accounts. As in the previous work, a CGs Transaction Model (or 'Transaction Graph') illustration is used (Andrews & Polovina, 2011; Launders, 2011a; Polovina & Andrews, 2011). However unlike its simple case study scenario (namely a university's community objectives), the FT case study includes business rules visualised through Peirce's cuts. The detail of the case study is described as follows.
Description of the Case Study
The company (TRA Inc.) buys and sells shares of securities and manages its clients' assets. Portfolio managers create and manage accounts. A portfolio is owned by a legal entity. The portfolio is managed by a portfolio manager who works for an investment firm. A portfolio is described by a creation date and a value. It has a number of positions. Each position holds an asset and is described by a quantity and an acquisition date. The value of a portfolio is the total value of all the securities held in the portfolio.
There are three different categories of assets: real estate, cash, and securities. Real estate and cash are described by a name. Securities are described by: a security ID, a name and a price. There are three categories of securities: options, bonds, and stocks. Securities are issued by a legal entity that is called an issuer. The issuer can be: a company, a municipality, an agency, or a government.
There are many reasons that motivate issuers to issue securities. For example, the issuer might need to repay debts or raise capital (get some money to invest). Issuers and the securities they have issued can be positively or negatively affected by market events. Market events could be upgrades or downgrades by credit rating agencies. Some issuers are classified as `restricted' by portfolio owners and investment firms. Orders (for buying or selling assets) are placed in the interest of a portfolio. An order is placed by a trader or by a portfolio manager.