A Live Trendline is a user-drawn trendline that "watches" the price action. If the price goes through the trendline (either from above or below, depending on whether the price was above or below the trendline when the trendline was being created), then the window flashes (if it is visible) and a notice appears at the top of the screen. If DollarLink is in text mode, then the notice appears at the bottom of the text screen.
If you have many live trendlines and if they are triggering, then it is easy to overlook a notice when it comes up on the screen. At the suggestion of a DollarLink user who uses live trendlines extensively, we are now using Hot Quotes as an additional alerting mechanism.
When a trendline triggers, in addition to flashing its window and displaying a notice on the screen, DollarLink now checks to see if the symbol that triggered is part of the Hot Quotes. If it is, then that symbol's hot quote will also flash. It does not matter whether the window's page is active or in the background.
If a live trendline "untriggers," i.e., if the price went through a trendline -- which caused the window to flash -- and subsequently no longer goes through the trendline, then the alerts stop and the hot quote stops flashing.
The Web has hundreds of sites that offer to display free stock quotes. Usually that means that you have to enter the symbol name of a stock and the site will then fetch the current price quote for that stock. "Current" usually means 15-minutes delayed quotes. To get a quote for another stock you'll have to enter the symbol for that stock, etc. In general, it's a cumbersome process and not worth the effort.
Some sites have improved on this and offer quotes for a batch of symbols (usually up to 10). Data Broadcasting (http://www.dbc.com) and PC Quote (http://www.pcquote.com) fall into this category.
Other sites have gone further and offer portfolio creation where each portfolio can have hundreds of symbol entries. Yahoo (http://quote.yahoo.com) and Microsoft Investor (http://investor.msn.com) both offer portfolio tracking. (We find Yahoo's approach better.) Quotes are usually 15 or 20 minutes delayed.
All these approaches are still inferior to a dedicated datafeed. You have to click something on the screen in order to get the Web site to refresh the quotes, and due to the slower-and-slower nature of Internet it may take 10 or 20 seconds (or even minutes, if you have a large portfolio of quotes) before you get the quotes on the screen.
There are some Web sites that offer automated (i.e., self-refreshing) quote updates for a user-created portfolio, but generally you have to run some proprietary software rather than just a Web browser. Usually you download the software off the Web site and then run it as an application that uses the TCP/IP network protocol of the Internet. Some sites charge for this approach and some do not. Usually the quotes are delayed 15 or 20 minutes, and, of course, transmission is highly dependent on Internet traffic. Data Broadcasting offers such a service (but it is not free), and PC Quote claims to have a similar service which is free (meaning it is advertiser-supported). We say "claims" because after several attempts we were not able to access this service and just gave up. Pointcast (http://www.pointcast.com) has a free service, but when we checked, it was slow (and tended to crash the computer!).
We have found a few Web sites that give away historical stock and/or commodity data. The data can be a useful source for DollarLink if you missed a few days of quotes.
On the commodity side, we found two sources: Ira Epstein (http://www.iepstein.com) and Potts (http://www.teleport.com/~rpotts/prices). Both of these sites allow you to download ASCII commodities data off their sites.
On the stock side, we have found two sites that allow you to download free stock, indices and mutual funds data. They are Microsoft Investor (http://investor.msn.com) and StockWiz (http://www.stockwiz.com). Neither one of these sites has much historical depth; the data usually is no older than 1996. The quality of data is unknown, but the price is right.
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