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Whoa guy... You made a mistake in your cut & paste operation. I DID NOT
make the statement you attribute to me below. That was made by someone that
I was taking issue with. Your statement that your credit card was rejected
(presumably because of the date and not your credit history <g>) would
support my original contention that when a year date in 2 digit form is sent
upstream, there could be problems in supposedly compliant systems using
windowing programming techniques.
But let's take this home and stir-up the pot a bit <g>....
This issue of 2 digit dates and Y2K compliance will have direct impact on RT
members. Most everyone here has a collection of pricing data over time that
is used for graphing purposes, computations, building systems, etc. It is
likely that most (if not all of that data) has a date field in the form
YY/MM/DD in the price record representing open, close, high, low numbers for
a specific date. This data is then run through programs and also pumped
into various spreadsheets and databases.
What happens come the millennium transition? Jan 1, 2000 is a Saturday.
Let's say it is Monday, Jan 3, 2000 and you want to compute a 10 day MA.
How do you count back 10 trading days with a 2 digit year field? What's the
result of 000103 - 991224 (or whatever)? A negative number. At the
minimum, you will need some sort of date windowed program routine to process
the 2 digit year data after the century turns.
If you use a commercial program where the vendor says they are Y2K compliant
they will probably be using a windowing technique. However, a windowing
technique will fail if you want to graph/ compute/whatever, far apart (in
time) data, say the crash of 1929 overlaid with 1999 since the windowing has
to stop somewhere (typically it is at the 50 year mark). You'll need a
custom windowing routine where you can change the break year for different
tasks. Remember, windowing can ONLY work over a 100 year period at most.
Anything more and you need 4 digit dates. Also, year date data that is
sometimes in 2 digit form, sometimes in 4 digit form can't be supported
easily (if at all).
And what happens in terms of data providers themselves? What if the data
provider is now shipping data with 4 digit years? Might not work with your
current processing program! Are they going to provide you with a choice of
data with 4 digit years or 2 digit years? And if the data people don't
provide you with a (working) conversion routine, you might have a mixture of
2 digit years in your historical data and 4 digit years form the current
data vendor. A certain recipe for problems.
If the data vendor sticks with 2 digit years into the next century, then you
will need a program vendor who supports date windowing. What happens if you
want to try a new, hot program that requires 4 digit year input? You might
have to retain two complete sets of data - one with 2 digit years and one
with 4 digit years (and continuously convert new incoming data).
I've referred to commercial vendors above. What about shareware programs
that you use or even your own code that you may have written? How about VBA
macros you may have written that run off of an Excel spreadsheet and that do
some date processing? All those old version xxx programs that you still
love are NOT going to work.
And how many different programs do you use daily to pump data through? The
vendors are all going to take different approaches to dealing with the Y2K
problem which will surely create huge problems in the process.
MetaStock's summer 1998 newsletter makes reference to patches that will be
available later this year for millennium compliance. They have also
declared previous versions of MetaStock obsolete and WILL NOT support them
for y2K compliance. They do not specify what these Y2K patches will do or
how they will work. A search on their website for the keywords Y2K or "year
2000" generates 404-not found errors.
If trading is your business, then you need to consider these issues. If you
don't, then you might not be able to produce the technical guidelines that
you need to do your business. Think about it, unable to produce weekly,
monthly, yearly graphs or the indicators that you overlay on them. Can you
trade without this information?
JW
abprosys@xxxxxxx <mailto:abprosys@xxxxxxx>
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-realtraders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-realtraders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Paul Weston
Sent: Saturday, October 24, 1998 11:09 AM
To: RealTraders Discussion Group
Subject: RE: Y2K impact?
Message text written by INTERNET:ug@xxxxxxxxxxxx
>
JW writes:
> >>All credit card processors are now Y2K compliant<<
<
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I just recently had a 02/00 card rejected.
What is your source of information that says that all credit card
processors are year 2000 compliant?
My local grocery store tells me thier's are not.
Regards,
Paul Weston
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