DollarLink News -- September 30, 1995

Enhancements Added

Fixed Number of Days in Historical Charts

With historical charts (5-, 15-, 30-, 60-minutes and daily), DollarLink normally keeps adding bars to the chart. Thus, a 5-minute bar chart that initially may have had only 2 days' worth of bars, can get bigger and bigger (up until the window limit, which would be about 12 days for 5-minute charts).

We have now added a way to keep the same number of days in a chart and just keep dropping the data for the oldest day at the start of each day.

Whenever you replace a chart in a window, if it is a historical chart, DollarLink will now ask you if you want the number of days in that chart to be fixed. If you say yes, then DollarLink will retain only N days in a chart at the start of a day. N is defined in SETUP (part 1, questions 30 through 33) as the maximum number of days you can put up in a chart when you replace a chart.

Regain 2-Digit $SPY Accuracy

As you will recall, the $SPY market index is a DollarLink-computed symbol that is a copy of the $SPX symbol but with two digits of accuracy.

Recently, with the stock market's big runup, the $SPY has become too large and has lost its second digit of accuracy. There is a fix to that, however, that does not require an update from us.

When DollarLink starts up, it looks for a file in the main DollarLink directory called ACCURATE that tells DollarLink which symbols it has to treat differently to retain an extra digit of accuracy. If DollarLink does not find this file, it relies on a built-in list.

You can modify (or create) the ACCURATE file as shown below. Then the $SPY will have two digits of accuracy again.

The file ACCURATE is a simple text file that you can modify or create with a text editor or word processor (tell the word processor to save the end result as an ASCII file). The file should have 9 lines as shown:

SPX,SPY 
OEX,OEY 
XMI,XMY 
UTIL,UTYL 
IN X,IN Y 
dummy,dummy 
COMP,COMP 
dummy,dummy 
480.00

That's it. Either create this file if it does not exist in the DollarLink directory, or from the DollarLink directory load the existing ACCURATE file into a text editor and modify it there.

Windows 95 and DollarLink

DollarLink runs fine under Windows 95. Once it is running, in order to enable the big + key (to switch between text and graphics) at the far right of the keyboard, select the DollarLink windows properties and turn off the Fast ROM emulation in the Screen tab.

You can also create a startup (PIF) file in the Windows Startup that calls either the $.BAT or the $$.BAT batch files to start DollarLink.

Finally, one of our customers pointed out to us that you can disable Windows 95 altogether and just use it as DOS 7 (and presumably take advantage of its faster disk access capability). Just edit the C:\MSDOS.SYS file and change the line GUIBOOT=1 to GUIBOOT=0. (If you still want to go into Windows after that, just enter WIN [enter] at the DOS prompt.)

Internet: We're On The Web

We now have a page on the World Wide Web. Like most of the pages on the Web, our page is an electronic billboard on the information superhighway. It describes some of the products DollarLink Software is involved in. The products are: DollarLink; STS, a mutual-fund timing e-mail-based advisory service; and DollarWin, a Signal Report on mutual funds. Both the STS and DollarWin pages display some performance charts that show how well we have invested this year (up about 45% on the average).

The address (or the Universal Resource Locator -- url for short in Internet jargon) of DollarLink Software's site is

http://www.dollarlink.com

If you have access to the Web -- remember that now CompuServe, America On Line, and Prodigy have gateways to the Web -- please visit our site and take a look around.

By the way, both DBC and PC Quote have their own sites on the Web.

DBC: http://www.dbc.com

and PC Quote: http://www.pcquote.com.

Check it out.

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