Articles

Trailing stop is a very useful tool that allows you to make the maximum profit on a position while limiting your losses.  As the stock price goes up, the trailing stop moves a "high water mark" against which any downturn is measured.  When you set a trailing stop, you can set the maximum percentage loss you are willing to take on a position, and the trailing stop function will automatically notify you if that condition is met.

The trailing stop extension that implements this basic functionality is now available at no additional charge for Personal Stock Streamer 7.1 and later.  To download and install this extension, select the Extensions command from the Tools menu, then select Get More Extensions.  Although we have tried to make this extension as efficient as possible, one caveat of installing it on slower machines is that it may noticeably slow down Personal Stock Streamer if you have lots of tickers in your portfolio.

To set a trailing stop alert, select one or more tickers then select the Set Trailing Stop command from the Tools menu.  A window will appear that will ask you to enter the stop percentage and what action to take when the stop is reached.  When you press OK, the trailing stop is set for all of the selected tickers.  The initial "high water mark" for each ticker is set from the higher of the average basis and current price, and is adjusted as necessary when the ticker prices is updated.  If the target loss percentage is reached, an alert is generated with the selected alert action.  To remove a trailing stop alert from a ticker, select the Clear Trailing Stop command from the Tools menu.

The trailing stop extension creates a Trailing Stop column in the Active Securities view that shows the current high water mark and target loss percentage for each ticker where the trailing stop is set.  Although this column is added to the list of columns available in the Active Securities view, it is not displayed automatically so you will need to use the View->Layout->Arrange Columns command to add it to your list of visible columns.

Since the trailing stop extension only implements the basic trailing stop strategy, if you are familiar with VBScript you may wish to modify it to implement more complex strategies according to your needs.  See the Developers section of this site for more information.

Over the years we have been asked for a way to create custom columns in the Active Securities view.  While we have always intended to provide this feature, it just took us a while to get the software ready, including moving to the new .stkx file format that makes it possible to save the custom column settings.

Personal Stock Streamer 7.1 includes a new plug-in that for the first time allows you to create custom columns from the Options->Preferences->Custom Columns screen.  There two types of custom columns: memo columns and expression columns.  Memo columns are text-only columns that can be edited directly to include notes and other information; to edit a Memo field, first click on the ticker to select it, wait a second, then click on the memo field.  Expression columns can contain a mathematical expression that calculates a value, and that value is displayed in the column.  The benefit with expression columns is that the expression can reference other columns and fields from the ticker, and that expressions are compiled so they run very fast.  However, because expression columns are evaluated on each ticker update even fast expressions will still impact system performance to some degree.

Custom columns can appear in the Active Securities and Current Holdings views, but when you first create them they are not visible right away. Instead they are added to the list of available columns, so you have to use the View->Arrange Columns command (or the corresponding toolbar button) to make them visible.

One other thing you can do with this new plug-in is to create scriptable columns.  Scriptable columns work with the scripting plug-in inside Personal Stock Streamer 7 to allow the ultimate flexibility in defining custom columns, using any of the supported scripting languages including VBScript, JScript, and Python.  Because you have full script access, you can use historical data, news, and even external data sources to generate the content for the custom column.  Since scripting is a slightly more advanced topic, I will post a separate article in the Developers section that describes how to create scriptable columns.

The Price Relative extension is available through the Extensions command under the Tools menu.  This extension adds a Price Relative indicator to the chart indicators, which can be used to compare the currently charted ticker with another ticker.  This is most often used to compare the ticker to an index such as the S&P 500, which is included as the default parameter.

RSS started out as an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary, but these days those definitions are no longer adequate.  Basically, RSS is a standards-based format for distributing content such as news, blogs, articles, and even audio.

Personal Stock Streamer 7 includes a built-in RSS reader module that lets you "subscribe" to most RSS feeds available today.  The lists of headlines are updated automatically, and a little "unread articles" indicator is displayed at the bottom of the Personal Stock Streamer application window to tell you how many new articles are available.  To see the RSS reader window with your current subscriptions, select the "RSS News Headlines" command from the Tools menu.

While we have pre-populated the built-in reader with a handful of feeds that we thought you might find useful, you can add as many of your own feeds as you want.  We have created a resources page to which we have added many more recommended feeds; all you have to do to add those feeds to your active subscriptions is to drag and drop the links into the RSS reader window.

A little bonus that we have included is the ability to automatically create Yahoo Finance news feeds for most stock tickers by simply dragging and dropping the tickers from your Personal Stock Streamer window into the RSS reader window.  (Right now you can only drag and drop one ticker at a time, but we will expand this capability in the future.)  When you create a news feed for a ticker, it will only receive headlines specific to that ticker.

We welcome suggestions for improvements to the RSS reader, as well as recommendations for additional feeds for our resources page.  Please send them to us through the contact us page.