Technical Analysis Scanner (www.flexsoft.com)

["W. Lawson McWhorter" <lawson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Just a follow up to previous posts about Technical Analysis Scanner (TAS).  The web 
site has been moved to the developer's home page http://www.best.com/~mmoore/

All of the links don't work properly yet, but it looks like you can download a demo.  As 
I remember, the demo is a fully working program, but is limited to scanning a small 
number of securities.  In the full version of course, you can scan around 10,000 
securities at a time, over multiple directories, and multiple data formats.

I constantly see posts to the Omega-List griping about chart-scanner.  TAS may be 
perfect for many people like me, who follow a large number of securities and primarily 
use end-of-day data.  TAS is certainly not as pretty as TS and may be a little harder 
to program, but with a little work, it should pay off.

For example, I use it every day to run through a database of 1500 stocks in MetaStock 
format.  Here is an example of the output sent to an ASCII text file.

                Technical Analysis Scanner (TAS 5.36)
                    Run Time: Fri Oct 16 21:34:58 1998
                Script Name: test    Ticker Name: AVGVOL


TICKER   NAME            50DAYATR BUYSTOP SELLSTOP   RISK  INSIDE DAY
---------------------------------------------------------------------
AET      AETNA INC         1.52   85.5000  84.7500  0.8750 INSIDE DAY

I get the symbol, name, the 50 day average true range, my buy stop, my sell stop, my 
risk, and whether the previous day was an inside day or not.  You can program TAS to 
output (and sort) things any way you want to see them.  It is a DOS program, works 
fine in Windoze 95, and is blindingly fast.  Although it is primarily designed for 
scanning, TAS can also do some rudimentary (compared to TradeStation) backtesting 
and charting.

Also, Martin Moore, the developer has informed me that there will be a Y2K patch 
available on the web site by June 1999 to fix any Y2K problems, including problems 
with the MetaStock format.  At the rate Omega is going on a patch for TS 4.0, I 
wouldn't be surprised to see him beat Omega to the punch.

I have no relationship with TAS, except as a very satisfied user for many years.  As a 
matter of fact, I don't event think I have the latest version.  At any rate, I think many 
people might find TAS useful.  It is very reasonably priced and compliments other tools 
like TradeStation.  TradeStation can't be beat for a lot of things, but for end-of-day 
scanning, it leaves an awful lot to be desired.

Best wishes,

Lawson McWhorter
lawson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx