A few months ago, one of our customers asked me whether it was possible to have a price performance report that showed gains for more than one period of time.  Specifically, she wanted to know the change over 5, 30, and 90 days in order to see general price trends for current and potential investments.  I told her, of course it is possible with Personal Stock Streamer extensions.  I don't expect all of our customers to be programmers, so I told her that I would do it when I had some time.

I recently had some time.  This extension creates a report that looks like this:

As you can tell, it has several improvements over the original Price Performance report, notably the addition of company names to the left column, and green/red coloring to indicate gains and losses, and sorting of the output based on the ticker.  Because it works over fixed periods of time, this report ignores the filter setting at the top of the Report view, but it can be easily modified to handle other periods of time.

Personal Stock Streamer customers can download this report at no additional charge.  Under the Tools menu, select the Extensions command, then select Get More Extensions.

Trailing stop is a very useful tool that allows you to make the maximum profit on a position while limiting your losses.  As the stock price goes up, the trailing stop moves a "high water mark" against which any downturn is measured.  When you set a trailing stop, you can set the maximum percentage loss you are willing to take on a position, and the trailing stop function will automatically notify you if that condition is met.

The trailing stop extension that implements this basic functionality is now available at no additional charge for Personal Stock Streamer 7.1 and later.  To download and install this extension, select the Extensions command from the Tools menu, then select Get More Extensions.  Although we have tried to make this extension as efficient as possible, one caveat of installing it on slower machines is that it may noticeably slow down Personal Stock Streamer if you have lots of tickers in your portfolio.

To set a trailing stop alert, select one or more tickers then select the Set Trailing Stop command from the Tools menu.  A window will appear that will ask you to enter the stop percentage and what action to take when the stop is reached.  When you press OK, the trailing stop is set for all of the selected tickers.  The initial "high water mark" for each ticker is set from the higher of the average basis and current price, and is adjusted as necessary when the ticker prices is updated.  If the target loss percentage is reached, an alert is generated with the selected alert action.  To remove a trailing stop alert from a ticker, select the Clear Trailing Stop command from the Tools menu.

The trailing stop extension creates a Trailing Stop column in the Active Securities view that shows the current high water mark and target loss percentage for each ticker where the trailing stop is set.  Although this column is added to the list of columns available in the Active Securities view, it is not displayed automatically so you will need to use the View->Layout->Arrange Columns command to add it to your list of visible columns.

Since the trailing stop extension only implements the basic trailing stop strategy, if you are familiar with VBScript you may wish to modify it to implement more complex strategies according to your needs.  See the Developers section of this site for more information.

Personal Stock Streamer 7.1 includes a new plug-in that for the first time allows you to create custom columns from the Options->Preferences->Custom Columns screen.  There two types of custom columns: memo columns and expression columns.  Memo columns are text-only columns that can be edited directly to include notes and other information; to edit a Memo field, first click on the ticker to select it, wait a second, then click on the memo field.  Expression columns can contain a mathematical expression that calculates a value, and that value is displayed in the column.  The benefit with expression columns is that the expression can reference other columns and fields from the ticker, and that expressions are compiled so they run very fast.  However, because expression columns are evaluated on each ticker update even fast expressions will still impact system performance to some degree.

Custom columns can appear in the Active Securities and Current Holdings views, but when you first create them they are not visible right away. Instead they are added to the list of available columns, so you have to use the View->Arrange Columns command (or the corresponding toolbar button) to make them visible.

One other thing you can do with this new plug-in is to create scriptable columns.  Scriptable columns work with the scripting plug-in inside Personal Stock Streamer 7 to allow the ultimate flexibility in defining custom columns, using any of the supported scripting languages including VBScript, JScript, and Python.  Because you have full script access, you can use historical data, news, and even external data sources to generate the content for the custom column.  Since scripting is a slightly more advanced topic, I will post a separate article in the Developers section that describes how to create scriptable columns.

RSS started out as an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary, but these days those definitions are no longer adequate.  Basically, RSS is a standards-based format for distributing content such as news, blogs, articles, and even audio.

Personal Stock Streamer 7 includes a built-in RSS reader module that lets you "subscribe" to most RSS feeds available today.  The lists of headlines are updated automatically, and a little "unread articles" indicator is displayed at the bottom of the Personal Stock Streamer application window to tell you how many new articles are available.  To see the RSS reader window with your current subscriptions, select the "RSS News Headlines" command from the Tools menu.

While we have pre-populated the built-in reader with a handful of feeds that we thought you might find useful, you can add as many of your own feeds as you want.  We have created a resources page to which we have added many more recommended feeds; all you have to do to add those feeds to your active subscriptions is to drag and drop the links into the RSS reader window.

A little bonus that we have included is the ability to automatically create Yahoo Finance news feeds for most stock tickers by simply dragging and dropping the tickers from your Personal Stock Streamer window into the RSS reader window.  (Right now you can only drag and drop one ticker at a time, but we will expand this capability in the future.)  When you create a news feed for a ticker, it will only receive headlines specific to that ticker.

We welcome suggestions for improvements to the RSS reader, as well as recommendations for additional feeds for our resources page.  Please send them to us through the contact us page.

Introducing Personal Stock Streamer 7.0

After more than a year of development, DTLink Software is pleased to introduce the next generation of portfolio management software: Personal Stock Streamer 7.0.

Based on feedback from our customers and investment industry professionals, we have added several major new features and made other important changes in this release to make Personal Stock Streamer the platform of choice for active investors, portfolio managers, and investment trainers.

Real-Time Charts and Technical Analysis

Personal Stock Streamer 7.0 includes a greatly improved charting module that provides more of what our customers have been asking for. Real-time streaming charts are now faster, more accurate, and easier to use. Extensive improvements have been made to bring the functionality in line with professional-level charting packages, including improved labeling and scaling, multiple intervals for historical and intraday charts, and the ability to zoom in on any chart segment, all the way down to 1-hour segments on intraday charts. You can now easily display multiple charts with multiple profiles at the same time.

RSS News Feeds

In this release we have added a news reader module that allows you to subscribe to any of the thousands of news feeds and blogs currently available on the Internet, including Yahoo ticker news feeds and financial news from publications such as The Wall Street Journal. The news reader runs automatically in the background, retrieving new headlines while you are online. It is also completely integrated with Personal Stock Streamer, allowing easy drag/drop creation of feeds as well as bookmarking of feed articles.

Extensions

Personal Stock Streamer extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Personal Stock Streamer or extend existing functionality. Extensions can access portfolio and transaction data, generate custom reports, create custom technical indicators, generate alerts, display information in a window, and more. We have provided functionality to allow customers and third party developers to create many different types of extensions, but we have also made it easy to add to this functionality as we learn more about our customers needs and how the extensions are being used in practice.

Another benefit of Personal Stock Streamer extensions is that you can now access your portfolio data from OLE-compatible applications such as Excel, where previously you had to depend on the very limited DDE support. Many of our customers who do custom analysis in Excel can now link directly to their portfolio data in ways that were previously impossible.

One of our goals with Personal Stock Streamer 7.0 was to bring extensibility within reach of a large number of our customers by including support for common scripting languages such as VBScript and JScript. With this new support, just about anyone who has written macros for Microsoft Excel or written JavaScript for HTML pages will be able to write Personal Stock Streamer extensions.

Other Improvements

We have now moved all historical data from individual text files on your hard drive into a lightning-fast SQL database, which greatly speeds up storage and retrieval of historical data for charting, and allows easy access to the data through the new extension interface. We have also changed the document format to a new XML-based format that will make the software much more robust and resistant to data corruption. This will also allow tremendous future flexibility and interoperability between this and future releases of the software. In addition to the new data format, we have improved the data handling to help ensure the ongoing integrity of your financial data files.

How to Get It

You can download the latest release of the software directly from our Downloads section, or if you are already running an earlier version of Personal Stock Streamer you can get it by running the Software Update Wizard under the Help menu.  The software is designed to be upgraded in-place, so you do not need to uninstall the previous version of the software before installing this release.