In this issue:
I. Quote.com discontinuing service to third party providers
II. Buttafli9s
III. From Technical Support
IV. Editorial Comment by Steve Ward, CEO
V. One way to stop this newsletter
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I. Quote.com discontinuing service to third party providers
eSignal has purchased quote.com and has now announced that they plan to discontinue Quote.com data service to third party software programs (like NeuroShell) at some undetermined time in the future. We suspect it will not be a long time unless eSignal gets a barrage of complaints. If we hear what the discontinuance date is, we’ll let you know.
They have also stated that with the release of Qcharts 6.0, your Qcharts account will work with eSignal’s data feed (which we support).
So our intraday data users subscribing to Quote.com have several choices currently:
1. Convert to eSignal www.esignal.com
2. Wait for Qcharts 6.0 and be converted automatically (according to them – we have no idea if or how that will work).
3. Convert to Prophet.net 4. Convert to IB Feed
To get our view of the pros and cons of the feeds, take a look at the tip called “DayTrader Intraday Datafeed Comparisons” on www.ward.net
Here is the Quote.com (a.k.a eSignal) announcement:
http://forum.esignalcentral.com/showthread.php?threadid=19009
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II. Buttafli9s
The August issue of Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities Magazine contains an article about one of our customers. Kenneth Branch of Cocoon Trade in Lanham, Maryland explains his Buttafli9 system to our own Marge Sherald on page 98. Kenneth uses NeuroShell to analyze ratios and momentum as well as other inter-market correlations to measure the strength of potential moves. Check out his website at www.cocoontrade.com for more info.
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III. A Message from NeuroShell Trader Technical Support
Our support team for NeuroShell Trader has asked that some support issues be clarified in this newsletter.
Supported releases. We are only supporting two releases at this time: 5.1 and 4.9. That means that if you have any sort of bug or unusual results, we will want you to update to one of these releases and see if the problem persists before we work on it. Both of these releases are free updates (5.1 for owners of 5.0, and 4.9 to owners of 4.x). Both of these releases are “bug fix” releases, meaning that no significant features were added, but dozens of problems were repaired. Whatever problem you are experiencing is most likely already fixed.
Limited support for 4.9. Support of 4.9 is limited to assisting you with operational problems, or helping you bypass any lingering bugs. It does not include helping you learn or use the mechanics of the systems or any features. Please don’t ask us “How do I do ….” if you have not updated to release 5.0 or 5.1.
All support for release 4.9 ends in March, 2007, but you will still be able to use the program after that.
There is no longer any support for releases below 4.9. We cannot help you with any problems or provide any advice to owners of such old software. If your hardware security device for releases 1.x, 2.x, or 3.x fail, you will have to update to 5.x because there are no hardware replacements available.
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IV. Editorial Comment by Steve Ward, CEO
1. While I was on vacation I had a chance to read Benoit Mandelbrot’s new book “THE (MIS)BEHAVOIR OF MARKETS”. Mandelbrot is the genius behind fractals, and as expected he thinks the markets can be described by fractal geometry (not to be confused with chaos theory). Don’t read to book if you are looking for answers, though, because he freely admits that even he doesn’t know how to make a fractal model of the market.
On the other hand, he effectively (in my view) proves that the following, which are usually accepted as fact, are NOT true:
a. Markets move randomly and according to Brownian motion
b. Statistical measures like standard deviation can be used to measure markets in various ways.
c. Markets are “efficient”, always reflecting prices at the “correct” level. d. Price changes are continuous and can be described by a normal (bell curve) distribution
e. Modern financial theories like the Capital Asset Pricing Model, Alpha, Beta, Black-Scholes, Markowitz efficient portfolios, etc., are valuable analysis tools.
So also don’t read the book if you have an MBA based on modern financial theories.
I’ve been railing against use of statistics and normal distributions to measure various aspects of the market for years – read the text in the last three paragraphs of example 9 for instance. But I wasn’t smart enough to prove those observations. Mandelbrot was. The book was $17 in paperback at Borders, and is NOT filled with math.
2. What eSignal is doing upsets me very much (see article I). It is like the phone company buying the cable company and then announcing from now on you’ll have to get your TV signals and internet through DSL. Don’t get me wrong, I like eSignal’s datafeed, just as I like DSL. eSignal has overseas exchanges and FOREX, neither of which are supported by Quote.com. However, Quote.com has one heck of a lot more historical data than eSignal currently provides, and their interface we use is clean and smooth. Ok, their data hasn’t been the cleanest in the past, and there were server problems, but I believe that is because data was a stepchild after Lycos purchased Quote.com. I would much rather see a merger of the best of both Quote.com and eSignal.
Maybe deep down the real reason I’m upset is because of the huge effort we put into building the Quote.com interface for the DayTrader several years ago. Now all that work is shot, and if you were depending on unique Quote.com features like Breadthalizer symbols or huge amounts of intraday data, well then, you’re upset too.
Quote.com users have other choices in addition to eSignal. If price is an issue for you, you can’t beat Prophet.net’s special prices they made for us – $29.95/month for stocks or futures, and $39.95/month for both (+ real time fees for the exchanges). If you’d like to trade the same data you model, then IB feed and IB Feed Pro are well worth the money. Check out all the feeds from here:
http://www.neuroshell.com/products.asp?task=datafeed
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V. One way to stop this newsletter from coming
It is really easy. Just change your email address and don’t tell us.
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