DollarLink News -- February 28, 1995

Enhancements Added

Easier-To-Draw Horizontal Lines

In DollarLink, to draw a line over a chart you have to press DDS (Data, Draw, Single line) and then define two points by moving either the mouse cursor or the arrow keys. To draw a horizontal line, the two points should be at the same vertical location.

Since you need only one defining point to draw a horizontal line across a window, we have now made it easy to draw a horizontal line with one keystroke or mouse click. This makes it easier to draw percent lines, horizontal support/resistance levels, etc. Press DDH (Data, Draw, Horizontal line) and just move the mouse cursor to desired price level and either click the left button or press ENTER . That's it.

More Rigorous Error Checking For Options

There is a tremendous volume of index and equity options on all datafeeds and occasionally we get option records where all the fields (last, bid, ask, etc.) are zero. The number of these zero options is small relative to the total volume of options, but they do take up room and are a mild inconvenience to get rid of.

To release all background options, press C (Control), then R (Release) while on the quote pages. You can do this at any time. DollarLink flushes out all the background options (there can up to 20,000) and starts accepting new options.

We have now added more consistency checks for background equity and index options in order to eliminate (or at least reduce) these zero option records. Based on our observations so far, it looks like we have succeeded.

Article on Price Spectrum

There is an interesting article in the March, 1995 issue of Futures magazine. The article is on Market Profile as applied on an intraday basis. It seems that the author has discovered price spectrum analysis -- which he calls micro analysis -- and has applied it (rather intelligently) to the intraday behavior of various commodities.

The author, Daniel Gramza, believes that this micro analysis is a recent advance in software development. This is amusing to us because we have had intraday price spectrum analysis in DollarLink since 1987. And several other market researchers have come up with similar techniques (and interpretations of the markets using these techniques) way before that.

Dow Jones News Service Headlines with Signal

DBC has recently introduced real-time Dow Jones News Service Headlines on the Signal datafeed. This feature greatly enhances Signal's news headlines reporting. Instead of about 400 daily headlines, you can now get about 2,500. Most of the headlines are Wall Street related: stocks, bonds and corporate news. For $75 per month it's actually a good deal because the full Dow Jones News Service (headlines plus the body of the story) costs about $300 per month on other datafeeds, and a headline is really the meat of a story. If you are interested, call DBC at 800-S-MARKET.

DollarLink fully supports these headlines. However, if you are contemplating subscribing to these headlines, beware that they will take up lots of hard disk space. You should have about 30 to 40 MB of extra disk space available to hold these stories. This is a bit on the conservative side, but these days large hard disks are not expensive.

Also, the old cliche the faster, the better truly applies here because your PC will be bombarded with the headlines and a faster PC with a fast hard disk can process them quicker. If you don't know if your PC is adequate, call us and we'll try to advise.

Tip: How to Ignore Datafeed News

Sometimes news and headlines get in the way of trading and we are asked by our customers how to turn off the news.

If for whatever reason you want DollarLink not to process incoming news stories, start DollarLink with

$ NONEWS [enter]

command and it will ignore all news and headlines. This applies to DollarLink on all datafeeds.

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