DollarLink News -- October 30, 1995

Enhancements Added

Increased Number of Time & Sales Symbols

.T&S files are ASCII files that report all the Time & Sales information for each symbol in the portfolio. Until now they were restricted to 120 top symbols in the portfolio.

.T&S files were introduced a few months ago into DollarLink and have proven to be quite popular. They are useful for traders who study market dynamics, usually for intraday trading purposes. Some customers have DollarLink running on a network and can analyze the .T&S files on another PC on the network concurrently with DollarLink creating them.

You can now get Time and Sales .T&S files for all symbols in your portfolio.

To tell DollarLink to use this feature is quite simple. Just start DollarLink with

$ TXT.T&S:ALL [enter]

The number of symbols in the overall Time & Sales file (.TIC) is still limited to 120. But if you are using the .T&S files, there are no limits.

Since this implies that you can have .T&S files for up to 1000 symbols, some warnings are in order.

If you have a lot of symbols in your portfolio, keep in mind that the .T&S files will use up a lot of hard disk space; we estimate about 20 Mbytes/day. Thus, it is important to dispose of these files at the completion of a trading day; otherwise you are going to run out of space even if you have a 1.6 Gbyte hard disk. The best way is probably to let DollarLink delete them at the start of a new trading day. You set this option in Question 23 of Part 1 of SETUP.

DollarLink will even check your hard disk at startup to see if you have at least 20 Mbytes free for this TXT.T&S:ALL feature. If you don't have enough space, DollarLink will warn you and will save only up to 120 .T&S files. As a rule of thumb, you should have about 50 MBytes free, just to be comfortable.

This feature is best used with very fast, Pentium-class PCs. If the PC is not fast enough, it may start losing some quotes because the PC may be too busy writing Time & Sale information to the hard disk all the time.

Selective .T&S

To alleviate this CPU and hard disk crunch, you can also specify whether you want only those stocks whose symbols have 3 or less letters by entering

$ TXT.T&S:ALL:NY [enter]

or only those stocks whose symbols have 4 or more letters by entering

$ TXT.T&S:ALL:OTC [enter]

Utility to Manage .T&S Files

To better manage all these .T&S files, we've added a utility called ADDTS. Just enter

ADDTS [enter]

from the DollarLink directory when you are not running DollarLink and it will combine all the .T&S files into a compressed file and then delete the individual .T&S files.

ADDTS is designed to create a separate compressed file for each day's collection of .T&S files. ADDTS uses the LHA.EXE compression program that comes with DollarLink.

Each compressed file will be called TSMMDDYY.LZH where MM is the month, DD is the day and YY is the year. For example, TS091795.LZH would be the file that contains all the compressed .T&S files for 9/17/95.

To extract all the .T&S files from a specific TSMMDDYY.LZH file, from the DOS prompt in the DollarLink directory enter

LHA E TSMMDDYY [enter]

Forex Quotes On Signal Datafeed

We modified DollarLink to be able to process Forex quotes.

Forex on Signal means CrossMar Foreign Exchange Rates. Forex based on U.S. rates will work with all Signal receivers. Forex based on cross rates will work only on the the 19.2K cable feed in the U.S. or the satellite feed in Europe.

DollarLink can now process commodities-type quotes whose root is now either 2 or 3 letters and the name contains an -XX type suffix.

For example, JPY A0-FX or NI Z5-SI .

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