DollarLink News -- February 29, 1996

Enhancements Added

5100 Datapoints Per Window

In the last year, trading volumes have increased dramatically. It is now routine to have a 300 million share day at the NYSE stock exchange. A 400 million share day doesn't raise an eyebrow anymore.

High Trading Volumes

Some stocks have experienced tremendous upsurge in volume on some days (usually due to disappointing earning reports). Intel, IBM and Micron are just some of the stocks that have had 20 million share days.

The high trading NYSE and OTC volumes are affecting the commodities pits as well. It is now fairly common for the S&P futures to have 4000 or more ticks in a trading session.

DollarLink's Storage Capacity

This increase in trading activity has an impact on DollarLink's ability to store and display intraday charts.

Until now DollarLink was able to store and display up to 3600 datapoints (ticks) in each charting window. This used to be sufficient, but now that number is exceeded for quite a few trading instruments. When that happens, DollarLink discards the oldest third of the data in the affected window to make room for quotes that are anticipated to come in. As a result, the chart does not display a full day's action.

3600 vs. 1500 choice

The solution that we've offered until now to DollarLink users who want to see a full day's chart was to switch to the 1500 datapoints/window mode. In that mode, DollarLink stores and displays ticks every 20 seconds, and, although you won't see every tick, you will get a pretty good picture of the full day's action. The chart will be similar to the 3600-mode chart, only a bit sparer because it has fewer points.

However, some users must have and see every tick.

Memory Limitations

We've been working on increasing the datapoints capacity for some time now. It is a tough problem because of the 640K bytes memory limitation in DOS. We already take full advantage of extended (that's what all memory above the 640K memory is called) memory in a PC, but some data arrays and some DollarLink code instructions must remain in the 640K (called lower or conventional ) memory of the PC.

We Increased It to 5100

We've been able to increase the datapoints capacity to 5100 per window. However, this was achieved as a compromise: When you choose the 5100 option in SETUP (Part 1, Question 5), DollarLink will switch to displaying at most 4, not 8, windows/screen.

Caveats

The 5100-datapoints option should be used only with high-end 486 or Pentium PCs. It takes more CPU effort to chart, say, 5000 ticks than 3000 ticks.

Your PC should have at least 4 MB, preferably 8 MB, of installed RAM and about 600K or more of conventional memory free before you start DollarLink.

If you don't have enough RAM for the 5100-datapoints mode, DollarLink will complain whenever you try to replace symbols in windows or perform some studies.

If you have a large portfolio (over 750 symbols), then even the 600K may not be enough and you will have to use an aggressive memory manager such as QEMM in order to squeeze more conventional RAM out of your PC.

You can switch to either the 1500 or the 3600 or the 5100 datapoints/window mode at any time by running our SETUP program and choosing question 5 in Part 1. It is a multi-part question.

DollarLink Newsletters on Web

We are expanding our use of the Internet as a communications medium.

You can now read all our newsletters for the past year -- including this one -- at our Web site. The address is

http://www.dollarlink.com/news.htm

As the Internet becomes more and more widely used, we expect to transfer more and more of our administrative tasks away from the postal service to the Internet.

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