DollarLink News -- June 30, 1995

Enhancements Added

Separate Time & Sales ASCII Files

DollarLink can save incoming trade data for up to 120 symbols into a time-and-sales files. Now you can also tell DollarLink to keep building separate time-and-sales files for each one of these 120 symbols as well.

These separate files have the extension .T&S and are in an ASCII format already. For example, if you have IBM, $INDU and SP U5 in the first 120 symbols of the portfolio, then you will be building T&S files called IBM.T&S, $INDU.T&S and SP_U5.T&S.

Each incoming quote gets appended to its corresponding .T&S file. The format of each line in the files is

MM/DD/YY,HH:MM:SS,price,trade volume,total volume

The main purpose of this feature is to be able to access these data files while running DollarLink in a multitasking environment or on a network. That's why they are saved in an ASCII format. You can readily copy the data into another application that is running concurrently with DollarLink (either on the same PC or over the network).

DollarLink deletes all the .T&S files at the start of a new trading day so that you start with new files every day. If you exit and restart DollarLink during the day, the .T&S files are not deleted.

If you have DollarLink set up to not delete the intraday tick-by-tick files (files that have the extension .DAY; set in Question 23 of Part 1 of SETUP), then the .T&S files will not be deleted either.

Keep in mind that turning on the .T&S files may use up to about 8 megabytes each day, so it is important to have a big hard disk with lots of free space. You really have to watch it if you are not letting DollarLink delete the .T&S files at the start of each day.

To activate this T&S feature, first make sure that you have the time-and-sales feature turned on (Question 41 in Part 1 of SETUP). Then, whenever you start DollarLink, add the string TXT.T&S as follows:

$ TXT.T&S [enter]

Keeping Yesterday's Signal Reports

Due to an increased number of Signal Reports, the Signal datafeed is now transmitting these reports fewer times per day. It used to be that a report was broadcast at, say 10 p.m. on one day and re-broadcast again before trading began the next day. Not anymore.

At the beginning of a new day, DollarLink sweeps all reports and headlines into an MM-DD-YY.NUS file. Thus, if you want to see that 10 p.m. report, you can read or search the .NUS file.

We have now modified DollarLink to keep one-day-old Signal Reports to make them available to read or search.

If you now start DollarLink with

$ SRW [enter]

then DollarLink will keep yesterday's Signal Reports and you can read them as if they were broadcast today. This makes it more convenient. The downside is that it takes DollarLink longer to get going when you first start it up because it has to do more sorting and checking of old news and report files in order to figure out what to keep and what to throw away.

4th of July Holiday

DollarLink will be closed Monday, July 3, and Tuesday, July 4, for the Independence Day holiday.

Have a happy 4th!

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