Windows On Wall Street-Help!

vanity ^ | 12/08'1 | ivanhoe116

[ivanhoe116]

Windows on Wall Street has now become a subscription based utility through Financial Data Casting network, with IMHO a prohibitive fee ($79 per month)! The software, WOW v 7.0 that I purchased, is useless and I would like to know if any Freeper investors can recommend a stand alone stock charting utility. Online charts are fine, and I don’t need highly powered screening engines but I did like the features offered by WOW (i.e. addition of text, high/lows, running averages etc.). I cannot find a thing in stores and very little online. Suggestions much appreciated.

[Eugene Tackleberry]

Read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Malkiel (??) and you will see that any money or time spent on any technical analysis is wasted.

[DallasMike]

I got Microsoft Money at my local Wal-Mart for about $30. It does everything that I need it to do.

[Yasotay]

I WAS a huge WoW fan until they sold out to Omega. Your best bet would be Meta-Stock or TC2000.

[Yasotay]

Read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Malkiel (??) and you will see that any money or time spent on any technical analysis is wasted.

Only if making money is time wasted....ALL professional investors have TA done

[monocle]

You don't mention anything about data acquisition and how you are intending to acquire your data. I have an earlier version of WOW and acquire my data from another source, but I had to do a little programming to allow my newly acquired data to be used by WOW. The monthly fee for WOW is to a large extent for data acquisition. Depending upon what kind of charting you wish to do and how proficient you are in simple mathematics you can accomplish many of the basic charting techniques with Excel.

[Real Cynic No More]

I, too, bought Windows on Wall Street, but when I received it, found that it wouldn't perform the types of charts I wanted. Thinking that I had a bum copy, I communicated via e-mail to their one and only support tech. I sent an e-mail with specific questions on what I needed to do, and received a very patronizing response with only part of the answer. I responded to the tech in kind, and questioned why he was responding with such a snotty attitude (I am not the computer-illiterate bumpkin he assumed I was....he had only glossed over my questions, which were quite literal and specific. He had responded incorrectly to at least one of those questions, and I re- sent it asking him to please read it again....of course I copied his manager.) The follow-up e-mail I sent is the only one I got the information I needed where I found out that my version would not create the types of caarts that had been indicated on the box that it would do. Of course it was obvious from the response I got that the manager had chewed him out royally. I played around with it anyway, but then had a hard disk problem (unrelated to WOW) and had to replace my hard disk. When I did this, I did not first un-install WOW, thinking that since it was delivered on a CD that I would not have to. When I got my hard disk replaced, the original CD would not install. Not happy with the product because I was misled, and not knowing whether the installation problem was their fault or not, I decided WOW wasn't worth the hassle. I chucked the entire package and threw it away.

I do like TC 2000, but don't use it any more as www.clearstation.com gives me all the charts I wish to use. I thought there was a way one could obtain TC 2000 and then import data from other sources without using their costly update services, but may be mistaken.

[Rain-maker]

This might interest you and it is freeware stock program:

Real-time quotes, intraday charts, news monitoring and portfolio tracking using various real-time web sites that supply stock quotes. Live intraday charts with Technical Indicators, alerts, and historical charts will help your trading. Portfolio printing, Island Level II quotes, inline chart period changing, user-defined views, symbol lookup, SOCKS proxy support, and many other enhancements are also included. http://www.quotetracker.com/ Click Here

[habs4ever]

I've been a user of TC2000 for almost 10 yrs, and it does all I need.Omega is a pain.I'd recommend Worden's product to anyone, for pros and amateurs alike.Unless you want to spend several thousand a month for Bloomberg, stick with TC2000.

[Rain-maker]

Here some online stock charting sites:

SHARPCHARTS

CLEARSTATION

BIGCHARTS

DATEK

STOCK CONSULTANT

Have never used WOW, so I am not sure exactly what you are looking for in regards to charting. Hope this helps...

[Sabramerican]

Get Quotetracker

It does amazing things that used to (and still) cost thousands of Dollars.

It does it all. Including a link to long term charts.

Did I mention that it was free? Just click on the ads at least once a day.

[Sabramerican]

Logic says that is nonsense.

Does the news and finances of a company change daily? Even weekly?

If everything was fundamental, stocks would stay still day after day and move sharply up or down only at instances of new fundamental news.

There is no way you can look at any chart of any stock and not see that from moving avenges to Bollenger Bands, to many other indicators, knowledge of tech indicators is indispensable.

[gatex]

As a couple of others, I have also been using TC2000 for several years ---and am very pleased with the program and info.

Link to ---www.tc2000.com"

[monkeyshine]

This is my favorite online chart:
http://www.askresearch.com/cgi-bin/chart

Here is an opinion generator that is just 'ok'. I use it in conjunction with the above chart, but it's not highly responsive (that is, updated only weekly.. if you trade a lot (daily) it is practically useless but if you buy stocks and sell them months later it can be helpful)
http://thestreet.marketedge.com/secoprep.asp?sym=mo&refer=thestreet

Here is another chartmaker. This one has some other charts that the first one doesn't have.
http://stockcharts.com/index.html

The trick is to get the most confirmation of a buy and sell signal. One chart calling a buy or sell signal is not enough.

[monkeyshine]

Oh... in that "opinion generator" you have to go up into the URL and manually insert the stock symbol. The link gives you the opinion for MO (phillip morris) but if you wanted to know about LMT (lockheed martin) just go into the URL, and replace the mo with lmt.

[Cicero]

For what it's worth, my experience is that charting works most of the time, and will give you a series of small profits, and then it will go wrong, usually big time. In other words you make a little money week by week, and then you lose your shirt. So, no harm in doing it if you are playing with "discretionary funds," i.e. money you can afford to lose.

I ride on the train from NYC to Vermont with a smart guy who spends HOURS pondering over charts. Most of the time he makes money, but then every once in a while he takes a big hit. For instance, he gradually went out on a limb because he was doing very well with a new system and was using his profits to increase his positions--so he took a big hit on September 11. Who could have predicted that?

[Sabramerican]

Who could have predicted that?

If a stock takes a big hit, fundamentals have suddenly and unexpectedly changed. You can't blame technical analysis for failing to predict a fundamental catastrophe.

Although I have found in many instances that charts do- even subtlety-predict forthcoming bad news. Probably because "insiders" are quietly getting out before the bad news is released and the charts reflect the action.

[StriperSniper]

It does amazing things

Thanks for the tip on that one! I downloaded and played with it for a few minutes, looks real good.

[Sabramerican]

Welcome

If you have any questions, problems, issues, anything....go here to Yahoo

These guy's support is as good as their program.

[L_Von_Mises]

I used WOW for a while when I had the task of maintaining a stock index for a specific industry. It made it very simple because once I created all of the weights it automatically generated the index. After a while I found that I could go to the MSN website and use their stock price graphing utility and export the stock prices to excel. I could then simply link the files into excel. A little more cumbersome but FREE. You may want to look at their website. Just go to msn, click on money, then use the stock lookup feature to find the stocks you are interested in. It works very well. You do have to clean up the data a little (it creates a value of -999.99 where no trading occurred). It also has an industry lookup function that graphs an industry using indexes they created. My problem with that was that I found many companies were either omitted or included that should not have been. Good Luck.