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I am a technical trader, and use charts extensively. Your "persistent" charts are wonderful - no need to print, just pull it up... But, there are a few items that would make the charting facility even better.

1) The chartable area should be <b>extendable</b> past the current date/time and price range (ie, both axes). This would allow us to project trend lines into the future and uncharted price ranges, which is what chartists do.

2) The annotation <b>lines are very fat</b> - they should be much thinner, and a choice of primary colors would be good as well. I would like to be able to draw a horizontally or vertically <b>straight line</b> by dragging the mouse while holding the Shift key - this is the default for most graphics packages.

3) <b>Switching between annotation types</b> seems clumsy - always present pushbuttons to select annotation types would be better than having to select from a pop-out. In fact, typing at the cursor position should <b>automatically switch</b> you into Text annotation, then dragging the mouse should switch you back to line drawing.

4) This one is a stretch - I would like several <b>linked numeric data fields</b> on the chart control panel that would show and accept values that link to custom fields on the Active Securities View. This would tremendously facilitate updating the trading screen from the charts.

5) Finally, a real stretch... give us the ability to <b>show the analytics </b> on the Active Securities page. Things like the numeric Bollinger Band values and MACD move us a step closer to being able to spot trends, and in time, being able to trade very rapidly.



 

Thanks for the suggestions. Our schedule will be pretty full for some time as I mentioned while we were chatting in CollabInvest. So obviously I can't promise when or if any of this will be built but I can promise we will discuss them.

I particularly like your indicator column suggestion. We've been looking at doing something like that for some time as it would be really useful in alerts.

As for #3, just double click and it brings up the text tool.

I don't understand how #4 would work. You want to select values from the chart and have them added to custom column values in Active Securities?
 
      
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DTLink Software

I understand your time constraints - the wishlist is intended to provide food for thought and perhaps prompt others to think about what they wold like to see.

RE: Text annotation :
Sometimes (ie most times) I seem to double double click to do other things (like save a line), when I don't really want to add a text annotation. In fact, it is annoying to double-click and have the text annotation window open, and on several occasions when have tried the double click, it seems to not accept text. If you typed on the chart at the cursor position, what other possible connotation could it have other than "add this note at this postion" ?
      

If we could post graphics, I would link a pic to explain what I mean by input fields. I'll dummy one up and email it to you.

Basically, we use charting to develop values for 5 parameters that we link to alerts on the active securities page: BUY, ACCUMULATE, TARGET, LIGHTEN, OUT - all of which are self- explanatory. It would be handy to have access to these 5 fields on the control panel at the bottom of the chart, showing current values from the Active screen and allowing us to input new values from the chart. Being able to drag and drop or Capture and drop a value would be an extra added bonus, but being able to see what (if anything) is already on the Active page is critical.
      

The problem is that's a very specific bit of functionality. We would have to develop a more general and flexible approach to accomodate a wide range of investing styles.

As for posting graphics/charts to the site, it's on the TODO list.
 
      
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DTLink Software