I have been chatting with Yermo about this project that i've been looking for some development help on. He thought I should post here so we may benefit from others as well.
First let me say I'm a none programmer who has a little bit of experience w/ VB. About a year ago I began to use PSS and Excel to develop a near real-time method for developing PnF charts (point and figure) for selected stock tickers. You can see some of my original posts on this at the following two forum links.
http://www.personalstockstreamer.com/support/forum.html...
then it moved to the developer forum…
http://www.personalstockstreamer.com/developers/forum.h...
If you are not familiar with PnF charts they are not widely used but a simple explanation can be found by either goggle the term or try this link.
http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=support:using...
The PnF chart that I have been working on is a bit different where in stead of X’s and O’s plotted the volume of trade at particular price level is recorded on the chart in the place of the x or ‘o’. If you are familiar with Wyckoff methods of technical tape reading this will make more sense. If not these charts essentially help you see consolidation areas, supply and demand changes, etc. and help in the timing of entry and exits of trades. IMHO
The current VB program I constructed builds these charts where the ticker data comes from a text file which each line represents a ticker, price, volume and time stamp. This line of txt data comes from an Excel file that I connect to PSS using the DDE capability. I just use an exel macro to take ‘snap shots’ of the pss ticker (portfolio of stocks) at certain intervals. Typically 15 seconds to minutes and it runs throughout the trading session. At each sequence of the exel macro it appends a line of data to a text file which can be read from the VB program when I run the program. I have to imitate the start up by clicking a command button then the chart is built. To refresh the chart I have to start the VB program over again. You can imagine that the shorter the time interval of snapshots in Excel the more “bogged down” the exel and vb program become. In addition everytime I want the pnf chart updated I have to restart the vb program. I’d like to build a realtime chart that where the PnF chart is built on the fly like a ticker tape and would only stop if I stop the program or the streamed data from PSS.
Anyway, in discussion w/ Yermo it was felt we might be able to remove the use of excel and the dde by selecting the stock/ticker on the PSS portf view, right click on the selected ticker and in the pop up menu select an option to “build PnF”. The VB program I have currently is not very robust but I’d have to do away with the sequential reading of a text file to build the chart and somehow take the data into it from PSS in a “streamed” fashion. Tic by Tic or Last Sale by Last Sale.
As noted previously I would need some help and direction with this. Even some of the instruction given in the previous threads are a bit confusing for me. Also, I could share the code of the VB program I have for the PnF (if you don’t laugh). Hey it works but it’s not too pretty.
Well that’s about enough for now as I”ve gone on long enough. Any thoughts, input, help would be appreciated.
DaveM
