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Herb,
Sorry for answering with such a delay, but actually it hasn't delayed
anything: I have very little to tell. As I understood from your postings you
need something different: to automate (daily) data downloading while for me
it's a stock quote retrieval.
My time horizon in trading is "days" at least. But sometimes (like during
first hour or so after opening) I would like to SEE better what's going on
with stocks I am about to get into. I use real-time DBC's Market Watch
(press-a-key-get-a-quote service $29.95/month), but I cannot do it all the
way down all morning writing down the quotes on pieces of paper, not being
able to see a chart. Of course, free DELAYED intraday charts at
SchwabNOW:
http://www.schwab.com/SchwabNOW/SNLibrary/SNLib041/SN041.html
Wall Street City (by Telescan):
http://www.tscn.com/wsc/Corporate_Snapshot.html
Wall Street Research Net:
http://www.wsrn.com/home/companyResearch.html
INO MarketQuote:
http://www.ino.com/marketquote/
may help, but they are not really reliable: a Web site may be overwhelmed
(for those who don't pay) by requests at the very time you need it; sometimes
quotes are too delayed or just absent for a while. On other side, it doesn't
make sense for me to pay much more for a continuous real-time quote feed. So,
here comes a search for a compromise.
The problems I encountered in my quest trying a variety of stock retrieval
programs are (this is why I decided to post my findings on the list):
i) they are not dependable (sometimes they may miss a retrieval or give
wrong quote, time, ... because, I suspect, of not proper handling vendor's
often changing format); mind delayed quotes are free, so there is little
incentive for data vendors to maintain compatibilty with somebody's else
sofware;
ii) not many programs can draw intraday charts based upon collected quotes;
iii) some programs limit (from below) the time interval between retrievals to
15 min or so (vendors don't want to have their sites clogged by lovers of
free lunch);
iii) 90+ % of delayed quote retrieval applications don't have an option to
handle real-time quotes (again, I am not talking about continuous feed), or
at best they offer to buy from a vendor I don't know or don't want to know.
So, I decided to do it myself - the project is:
i) to find a simple Web agent (freeware NetBuddy seems OK) which would
periodically (every few seconds/minutes/hours/days/....) go to my DBC's
Market Watch Website and grab the page (nothing fancier than that!);
ii) to write a program (my programming repertoire is pretty old fashioned -
DOS and FORTRAN; Perl would be more appropriate here?) to strip HTML stuff
from the page, and reformat the quotes into a format accepted by a simple
plotting program able to redraw its plots as the source file gets updated;
iii) and hopefully enjoy it!
Let's see if I succeed.
Thanks. Sorry if it took too much of your time reading it.
Cheers, Vitaly
Herb Carter wrote:
> > > Hi all:
> > > Has anyone used the program "Unisyn Automate". I would like to have my
> > > computer do a number of tasks when I am at work or during the night. ie
> > > before I get home I would like to be able to have it sign onto the
> > > internet then my downloader program will start doing the daily symbol
> > > douwnload, when finished I would like a program to sign off the
> > > Internet. If not "automate" can anyone suggest another or is there a
> > > better way of doing this type of task. I am on the road 2-3 nights a
> > > week and it takes forever to update my database when I get back.
> > > Thanks.
> > >
> > >
> Thanks for the response and info. I am using Win95. Yes I would
> appreciate the ftp procedure. The key word for me is "easy". I am way
> behind the people on the list as far as computer understanding goes.
> I'll check out the Perl site this weekend. I originally got the autorun
> info from Vitaley. I am surprised know one else wants to autodownload.
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