Rydex Funds

Rydex Funds public Web site

Solutions: custom applications, design/identity
Vertical: corporate

Rydex sets itself apart in the mutual fund industry by offering professional investment products and services to both institutional and individual investors. When the Rydex marketing department decided to revamp the corporate Web site, they defined four goals. First, to improve the end-user experience with updated look-and-feel based on high-impact graphics. Second, to help investors make informed buy/sell decisions by providing performance charts based on current market information. Third, to cut ongoing maintenance costs by automating the charting applications. Finally, the new site was to be ready for deployment within one month.

Fig Leaf Software created a Macromedia Generator based charting application to allow current and potential customers and fund managers to select any of the 15 Rydex industry sector funds or 6 index funds for comparison with popular market indices such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, and NASDAQ 1000.

Rydex tracks the daily closing price of its funds along with the general market indices for storage in an offline legacy data warehouse (IBM AS/400). Each night, the Fig Leaf developed ColdFusion application parses data from the data warehouse to a Dual Pentium 450 server running ColdFusion Application Server, Microsoft SQL Server 7.0, a Web server and Macromedia Generator.

Fig Leaf designed the charting application to take maximum advantage of the online and offline processing capabilities of Generator. Rydex customers use online real-time charts to make informed buying and selling decisions and to track the performance of their investments over time. With online generation, end users can customize charts by selecting the indices and funds to compare, as well as chart type, size, and date range (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, multiple years, and since inception).

Charts that change on a scheduled basis are generated offline resulting in improved overall performance. The site home page features an offline-generated chart showing a snapshot of the best performing Rydex fund for the previous week. The result is a positive first impression and increased promotion of individual Rydex funds.

"Macromedia Generator puts the Rydex Funds Web site on the cutting edge of technology within the mutual fund industry. Most mutual fund Web sites offer information from the latest calendar quarter. Our highly interactive customizable charts are based on the last closing price of our mutual funds. We believe this is a key online feature that differentiates Rydex from the competition."

∼ Laura Joehl, Director E-Marketing & Commerce, Rydex Funds