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TJ this note is part humor, part angst.
How to waste an afternoon
By Trader
I wanted to evaluate how well AB can work for plotting some market
statistics, especially the McClellan Oscillator. Lets see, I need
some advance decline data in AB…don't have it right now.
Well, it should be easy to use AmiQuote to pull some data down from
Yahoo.
Oh, yeah, I need to unzip that new version of AQ, OK... Better
check the readme file to see if it changed a lot...looks OK for what
I want to do.
Lets see, I'll need the Yahoo symbols for A/D data so I can D/L with
AQ.
Go the Yahoo Web site, poke around for awhile, can't find any symbols
for adv or dec data, only today's numbers. Check some more....looks
like Yahoo does not have any symbols or historical data for adv/dec.
No Problem....I have the data in two different programs on my
workstation, I'll use that.
Lets see, I do MetaStock exports from QP2 all the time. That should
be easy.
Make a small list with a few indices and adv/dec data…export to MS
format...no problem.
Ok, Import that data into AB. Whoa, what is this? AB is
complaining about the QP2 symbols for NYSE advances !NY-A and the
others as well. Hmmmm, different data vendors use all sort of weird
symbols for market statistic data, surely TJ took that into
consideration....Hmmmm, maybe not...
OK, all I want to do is display the *%*(*& data. I have an ascii
file on my HD that gets generated every night that has the MCO
itself. I'll import that for display. Go to ascii import wizard,
Hmmm skip the first three lines, then just read the date and close
data on each line...piece of cake....
Whoa, 1500 errors, look around...damn, the importer wont read the
negative values in MCO.
OK, no Yahoo data available, can't get AB to import my data...time
to send a note to TJ....
Hours pass.............
Get response back from TJ, thank you very much. Hmmmm either he
does not understand the problem or else I don't understand his
response....probably the latter.
He says I should have used the "foreign" function....what the hell is
that????
Dig into AFL reference, says "foreign" is used to display data from a
second data series in addition to the data currently being
displayed. Well crap, that doesn't help.....I can't get the ^&3^%
(* data into AB to start with.....
Lets see, what else did TJ say....something about an e-mail....I
check my regular and alias e-mail boxes.....nothing
Mutter, mutter, mumble.....
All I want to do is import a couple a data files into AB and get on
with my life…this is ridiculous......
Go for walk to think this thing over.....conclusion....TJ may have a
better idea on how to do things but this stinks. How on earth is an
ordinary computer literate but non programmer supposed to make this
stuff work to do the most basic of tasks. The simple tasks have to
be....uh, shall we say....simple????
I still don't have the adv/dec data in the program and I am beginning
to understand why about every third request for help relates to just
getting some data into the program.
Comparisons: getting data into Metastock is fairly easy because most
data vendors convert to MS format. ASCII into MS is a little tricky,
but the help files are pretty good.
Tradestation/Supercharts is a no brainer for the user. They read MS
format, ascii, even my odd FastTrack FNU files directly....no
importing needed. AB is a real pain in its present state of
development if the user has to import data.
TJ....keep up the good work, but HELP your users out in this area.
And I still don't have adv/dec data in AB.....mutter, mutter,
mumble....I did say it was a wasted afternoon.
Trader
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