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Until now, DollarLink would ask you to supply a multiplier factor and then it would go through all the historical prices for the specified stock and multiply each price by the factor. Thus, if the stock had a two-for-one split, the multiplier should be 0.5.
It would also divide the volume of the stock by the multiplier to adjust the number of stock shares. Thus, if the multiplier is 0.5, dividing the volume by 0.5 means that now there will be twice as much stock.
Now DollarLink will ask you if you want to multiply the historical stocks by a factor or to add a factor to the prices.
If you choose the add-factor, then you will be asked to supply a number. This number, which can be negative, will then be added to all the historical prices of the stock in question.
Unlike the multiplier choice, the historical volumes are not adjusted.
This enhancement is useful to adjust prices of stocks or mutual funds whenever there has been a dividend or a distribution.
For stocks, the effect of a dividend is usually ignored and historical prices are usually not adjusted because dividends are usually a small percentage of a stock's price.
Mutual funds, however, are different in that a distribution can be quite substantial (witness this year's May distribution of Fidelity Magellan fund: about $10 on a $50 price/share) and should not be ignored. Thus, to properly adjust Magellan's historical prices after the distribution, you should subtract the $10 from all its historical prices. Therefore, the proper add-factor for DollarLink to use in this case would be -10.00.
In addition, recognizing the relentless increase in quotes traffic, PC Quote has a much faster transmission network, called Hyperfeed, that runs at 56K baud.
DollarLink can now work with this Hyperfeed network. PC Quote engineers have developed new software communications drivers that -- transparent to DollarLink -- can handle the processing of quotes at 56K baud in the DOS environment that DollarLink requires.
This is good news for DollarLink customers. The dramatic increase in quotes traffic in the last few years has made timely delivery of quotes, and especially of stock option quotes, quite difficult for the datafeed vendors. All datafeed vendors are looking into ways -- preferably transparent to existing applications -- of increasing their quotes network speeds. Hyperfeed is the first in that direction.
Please note that to use Hyperfeed and DollarLink you will most likely require a new satellite dish antenna (PC Quote works over satellite antennas; they also have high-speed and very high speed T-1 phone lines) and the new software drivers from PC Quote.
If you currently are using DollarLink with either Signal or BMI datafeeds and would contemplate switching to PC Quote to use Hyperfeed, note that you will also need to get the PC Quote version of DollarLink. We charge $50 for the switch, available to active customers only.
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