|
PureBytes Links
Trading Reference Links
|
Lionel, that's a very nice formula you have for searching for dead stocks.
There are some problems with it, though - sometimes (infrequently though)
stocks stop trading for as much as a few days for perfectly legitimate
reasons e.g. SEC probe, pending FDA action on a drug, etc. (this happened
with Aviron - AVIR - about a week ago). Or the data provider may have a
glitch that precluded it getting data on some stocks. So if you were to
delete all such stocks, you may be deleting stocks that may resume trading
soon. Also, sometimes a stock undergoes a name/symbol change so its upto the
individual to keep abreast of all symbol changes. Finally, some data
providers do not update the prices for some international indices till the
next day, so these may get deleted too if one were to delete all symbols
with no data for the current date.
Here's how I keep my data current:
1) I use the Metastock Downloader to download the data daily. At the end of
the download, it shows a Collection report. For this, I have the following
Filters checked - Error; Warning (OK is unchecked). So the Downloader
summarizes all Errors & Warnings. Then I investigate to see what happened -
highlight a stock and click the Details button. If, for example, it says
invalid symbol, then I check out a couple of web sites - I esp. like Yahoo
finance. By doing this daily, I keep abreast of all issues in a timely
manner. e.g. today (8/6/01), I got an error for Cabletron Systems (symbol
CS); reason - it has spun off 2 entities and its new name and symbol are
Enterasys/ETS (the other spin-off is RSTN).
2) The above comments were for the folder I maintain daily, which has about
2000 symbols (maximum allowed per folder). I also have thousands of symbols
in the default folders that Metastock creates when installed. I only update
their data every few weeks. After doing that, in order to weed out stocks
that have really stopped trading/have changed symbols, I run a very simple
exploration on all these folders -
Column A Year()
Column B Month()
Column C DayOfMonth()
Columns D, E and F, and Filter are empty.
So Metastock will run this and then display the results. On the displayed
report, I just click on a column heading to sort by that column (clicking
again on the column will reverse the sort order). This way, I get to see
very quickly which stocks' data is not current. If I have the time and the
number is small, I may investigate as to why that's the case, otherwise I
just highlight those whose last date is atleast 4 weeks old, right click and
choose Delete Security. By only deleting those stocks whose data is atleast
a few weeks non-current, I can be reasonably sure that its not due to
temporary factors. Its important to update the data before you run this (or
Lionel's) exploration!!!
Hope this helps.
Shashi
============================================================================
==============
Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2001 15:45:29 -0500
From: "Lionel Issen" <lissen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: 6.52 Stock Search
Put this in an exploration filter. I call mine Dead Stocks
I'm not sure if the last line is necessary.
y1:=2001;
m1:=08;
dt:=3;
test:=If(Year()<>y1,1,If(Month()<>m1,1,If(DayOfMonth()<>dt,1,0)));
Test=1
This was posted by "michael" <mslist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on 10/03/00
Remember:Update the full date before running, other wise the report will be
garbage.
Lionel Issen
lissen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
|