ShareScope Development

[zzaxx99]

Charting features I'd like (off the top of my head)...

• Click bars/candlesticks/days on chart, SS draws best fit support/resistance line through them
• Freehand drawing to highlight chart formations
• Alternately, draggable curves (ie fix end points then can drag mid-point to change arc, to highlight curves
• Wider range of line styles - I'd like a wide/faint band to highlight an Area of interest
• Ability to add circles/ellipses to highlight formations
• Force line horizontal (ie drawn a not-quite-horizontal line, and want to make it horizontal)
• Lines that stay drawn through the correct points when the timescale is drastically changed (ie going from a long timescale, highlighting a small section of that will have the drawn line going through the wrong points (miles out, in fact) - I have reported this one before)

Not a "charting" feature per se, but relates to the chart display - I'd like to be able to add a sector/other share/etc graph to the display, but for this epic/index only - not for all of them - it's a mystery to me why anyone would want to add the same epic to every chart

 

[DaveJB]

Cutting my own nose off a bit here, but....
(1) Datamining on TA criteria is essential, I'd suggest.... being able to datamine by adding the MACD filter to the Stochastic filter to the 52 week high and so on will be very popular. (It won't make people trade better, but you'll sell more). The charts are actually okay - deciding which ones to look at out of 2000 is the problem!

(2) Doing (1) will give Sharescope the equivalent of the Updata 'Highlighter', but I suspect it'd be much easier to use.... bonus point. (If you enjoy having Updata as a significant competitor ignore this point).

(3) Reduce your price, compared to US products the functionality in Sharescope does not make your RT product an attractive opponent to Esignal, TCNet etc. You need to make Sharescope as good as esignal, or make it about half the price so the 'bang per buck' is greater.

(4) PR - hit the UK and US mags with articles (TAS&C will happily accept any cogent piece - I'm amazed it took Updata all this time to twig that a review in TAS&C was worth having... ) and if you offer a UK/US charting package at a decent price, preferably with some TA to back it up then you'll get some decent results.

Okay, that goes beyond your brief, but I have never understood UK companies focusing purely on the UK when a 1% share of the world market is bigger than 75% of the UK.

Dave
(Meant kindly <g>)

 

[Caracole]

It's got NYSE + NASDAQ already. BUT IT HAS NO stock, commodities or other futures which is a MAJOR DISADVANTAGE. It's also very expensive in comparison to US providers. There is no technical scanning facility which simply suggests I need to move to Metastock and probably drop Sharescope.........and I have been with Sharescope for 4 years. Maybe I've just outgrown OR it has failed to stay up with the continual need for improvement. Sharescope will probably disagree but it has failed to keep up with the cutting edge

 

[DaveJB]

Okay,
I think the MD sees things differently - I personally think that if you aim at the Fundamental side then you are basically looking to dominate the niche market, as far as the home trader is concerned - TA traders decide they like certain setups, or they want to be able to compare thousands of stocks based on 100+ indicators, and so on... I think Sharescope's "TA drawing" is okay actually, but they never seem to have grasped that TA types want something to cut 2000 shares down to a couple of dozen (tops) to make the daily scan for setups manageable.

Some TA users will already do that - they'll have a few dozen shares they watch (maybe less) every day, and in Sharescope that's easy to set up - make a portfolio of your 'watch list' then scan them visually each day. I don't think most home traders do that - and Sharescope does not cater for those who want the program to pull out the 20 'shares of interest' from the almost 2000 UK shares it updates each day.... EPS and so on you can update today and take 3 months to work through, TA requires a shorter turnround.

As far as I can see, the US approach to trading still dominates - if the average US trader went to funnymentals a la Zulu principle then programs like Sharescope and Investorease would be well placed, but with the major markets being pretty well traded (by amateurs) on TA, and there being little likelihood of increasing market share by selling FA to insitutional FA types, then the obvious way to increase sales is to get into TA - preferably with some sort of 'edge'. The edge would be to develop a rep for specialising in some form of TA perhaps - Steve Nison, for example, could probably do okay selling a candlestick charting package!

I agree somewhat - I signed up to Sharescope in summer 2000, and think they've moved too little, too slow... contrary to what some might expect I would actually like to see them do well, but I think they suffer a blinkered approach... I don't think, when the chips are down, that Martin Stamp believes TA actually works.
Dave
edited for spleninge

 

[DaveJB]

Incidentally,
depending on whether you want EoD or RT scanning, personally I think there are better alternatives than Metastock.
Dave

 

[Roberto]

they never seem to have grasped that TA types want something to cut 2000 shares down to a couple of dozen (tops) to make the daily scan for setups manageable.

Sharescope does not cater for those who want the program to pull out the 20 'shares of interest' from the almost 2000 UK shares it updates each day.

Those are also exactly my thoughts on ShareScope. I'm no longer a subscriber.

 

[DaveJB]

Yeah,
I still subscribe - I don't use it for TA, although sometimes if I want to check something out I will draw a chart up in it to see what it looks like. It's still a very good program and datafeed I think, there's a danger of chucking the baby out with the bathwater perhaps - those purely interested in finding TA setups will probably use other programs to do that, but I suspect there are still quite a lot of people picking value, growth or other fundamentals based shares and then using the charting to time entry.... in which case datamining isn't too bad for filtering to a useable daily scan.

It's up to the boss of the company to decide the direction the program should go, and I think the MD is probably very happy with it... not do what we want is not a fault, it just means that as I use TA alone for trading it doesn't suit my needs as well as a more TA oriented program would. I think they'd sell more, and capture a bigger market share, by working on the TA more but the MD probably wouldn't agree.
Dave

 

[pb]

SS comes packed with a large number of indcators, but some basic TA features are still missing. Examples:

1. You can draw indicators based only on daily data. You might change the time periods of the main graph to weekly or monthly, but you cannot draw indicators moving averages on weekly data.

2. The Bollinger bands are at fixed multiples like 1.0 SD, 1.5 SD, 2.0 SD and so on. You cannot choose to draw, say 1.2 SD.

 

[zambuck]

Errors on Sharescope data yesterday....

Report of update errors on 08/12/2004 at 00:58:33
Error type SEAQ Name Folder Date
Data Error: Open price < Low price UB48 UB48 c:\Sharescope Data\Indices 12/07/2004
Data Error: Open price < Low price FIV FIV c:\Sharescope Data\Shares 12/07/2004
Data Error: Open price < Low price PRC PRC c:\Sharescope Data\Shares 12/07/2004

 

[theblackmamba]

would it be possible to inbclude sub sector indecies charts

 

[SScopeMarketing]

Hi Zambuck

Thanks for pointing these out. We run our more comprehensive reasonableness check (and any manual adjustments are made) on a Friday as part of the weekly update - so we wouldn't necessarily have spotted these until Friday. I have checked with my Data Manager and this was price data straight from the LSE - it is very unusual to get three anomalies in one day. We are following it up. You will see corrections on Friday.

 

[zambuck]

Hi SScopeMarketing

Thanks for the response....I see that data is checked every Friday...Perhaps I will check the data integrity on Saturdays only as by then all errors would have ben amended....

Although there were errors, I must say that data errors are very small indeed in SS generally....

regards

 

[zambuck]

Hi SScopeMarketing

Another question...in Plus version, which is intraday, is data of DOW and other indices avilable at the end of that particular day for these markets?....

Is it possible to do a test run of this version..?..I went on your site but was not able to download that version..

regards