Articles

Introducing Personal Stock Streamer 7.0

After more than a year of development, DTLink Software is pleased to introduce the next generation of portfolio management software: Personal Stock Streamer 7.0.

Based on feedback from our customers and investment industry professionals, we have added several major new features and made other important changes in this release to make Personal Stock Streamer the platform of choice for active investors, portfolio managers, and investment trainers.

Real-Time Charts and Technical Analysis

Personal Stock Streamer 7.0 includes a greatly improved charting module that provides more of what our customers have been asking for. Real-time streaming charts are now faster, more accurate, and easier to use. Extensive improvements have been made to bring the functionality in line with professional-level charting packages, including improved labeling and scaling, multiple intervals for historical and intraday charts, and the ability to zoom in on any chart segment, all the way down to 1-hour segments on intraday charts. You can now easily display multiple charts with multiple profiles at the same time.

RSS News Feeds

In this release we have added a news reader module that allows you to subscribe to any of the thousands of news feeds and blogs currently available on the Internet, including Yahoo ticker news feeds and financial news from publications such as The Wall Street Journal. The news reader runs automatically in the background, retrieving new headlines while you are online. It is also completely integrated with Personal Stock Streamer, allowing easy drag/drop creation of feeds as well as bookmarking of feed articles.

Extensions

Personal Stock Streamer extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Personal Stock Streamer or extend existing functionality. Extensions can access portfolio and transaction data, generate custom reports, create custom technical indicators, generate alerts, display information in a window, and more. We have provided functionality to allow customers and third party developers to create many different types of extensions, but we have also made it easy to add to this functionality as we learn more about our customers needs and how the extensions are being used in practice.

Another benefit of Personal Stock Streamer extensions is that you can now access your portfolio data from OLE-compatible applications such as Excel, where previously you had to depend on the very limited DDE support. Many of our customers who do custom analysis in Excel can now link directly to their portfolio data in ways that were previously impossible.

One of our goals with Personal Stock Streamer 7.0 was to bring extensibility within reach of a large number of our customers by including support for common scripting languages such as VBScript and JScript. With this new support, just about anyone who has written macros for Microsoft Excel or written JavaScript for HTML pages will be able to write Personal Stock Streamer extensions.

Other Improvements

We have now moved all historical data from individual text files on your hard drive into a lightning-fast SQL database, which greatly speeds up storage and retrieval of historical data for charting, and allows easy access to the data through the new extension interface. We have also changed the document format to a new XML-based format that will make the software much more robust and resistant to data corruption. This will also allow tremendous future flexibility and interoperability between this and future releases of the software. In addition to the new data format, we have improved the data handling to help ensure the ongoing integrity of your financial data files.

How to Get It

You can download the latest release of the software directly from our Downloads section, or if you are already running an earlier version of Personal Stock Streamer you can get it by running the Software Update Wizard under the Help menu.  The software is designed to be upgraded in-place, so you do not need to uninstall the previous version of the software before installing this release.