Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Letters To S&C
Letters To S&C
Letters To S&C
Letters to S&C
S&C Computer Program
Editor,
Would you please spend a few minutes to reply to my inquiry as to what equipment I will need in order to
run the upcoming Stocks & Commodities programs for non-CompuTrac users? I am currently using an
Apple II + with 48K and one disk drive. I have a Panasonic 1091 NLQ dot matrix printer and am
uncertain as to the interface card.
I wish to be one of the first purchasers in line—as my father was with CompuTrac—for my intention is to
start a business on the side using your program. I intend to teach others how to interpret charts technically
and how to trade using the various indicators provided by the studies published in your journals. I also
plan to provide prospective clients with charts produced by your software and, if they have their own
machine, perhaps to sell them copies of your program (for a mark-up) and then instruct them on set-up,
interpretation and data acquisition.
Therefore, I need to know the exact equipment needed and whether I have your approval to proceed with
my business plans. Keep up the wonderful job that you and your staff are doing and in the future,
perhaps, I will have a study to submit.
Thank You,
STEVEN WILKE
Omaha, NE
Our long-awaited Apple II-compatible graphics program for displaying stock and commodities price
information as well as Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities magazine's computer studies, is in
its final stage of development. We are now in "Alpha testing" which means we are doing some last
debugging of the program before its release. This, and the fact that my programmer has gone off to
school at MIT, has slowed the testing process.
Since this routine will be done all in machine language, and take advantage of Apple computer's new
double-high resolution graphics, it will require an Apple IIc or Apple IIe with an extended memory card
or the new Apple IIgs with a minimum of 128K memory and one disk drive. The program will not rely on
its own graphics screen dump printer interface and therefore your printer as well as interface card will
suffice. The graphics dumps will be done through a third party program that we will also supply for
about $40. It covers literally hundreds of combinations of printers and interface cards. In short, our new
graphics program turns an Apple II computer with 128K memory into a graphics device that charts much
like a Macintosh computer. The resoluton of the charts will be 560 by 192 pixels, thus, in most cases,
equalling or bettering displays on most of the cutrent monochrome computers. The user will be able to
use our, his own, or any third party BASIC routines to modify or analyze time series stock or commodity
data and then have our memory-resident graphics program display it in twice the normal resolution for
an Apple II computer.
We are hopeful that this system will eliminate the difficult graphing problems associated with
programming the computer while leaving all the driving up to the user. The user will be able to run any
kind of a routine in our open system, and read in data from virtually any format stored on disk including
CompuTrac or CSI formats as well as that of the Dow Jones Market Analyzer. We intend to keep the
price of the BASIC graphics program under $100 and for those Beta testers who first purchase the
system, we will include a free update within 12 months for their help in debugging the program.
JUAN A. COLOMER
Madrid, Spain
When you visit the United States, please feel free to contact me. I would be delighted to talk with you
further. With respect to your trying to make contact with US. stock or commodity brokers, perhaps
running your letter in this issue of Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities magazine will arouse
some interest. Your questions about an accounting program should probably be broken into two pieces.
For general accounting, there are dozens of programs for the IBM PC. For specific brokerage firm-type
reports there are only a handful (a good reference source is the Fortune magazine Investment
Information Directory). Two that immediately come to mind are Winning on Wall Street by Summa
Technologies and Portfolio Manager by Hale Systems.
With respect to general accounting, I suggest that you take a look at Peachtree's business accounting
system. This has been around for a long time and is well documented I suspect that it would do quite well
for you.
TechniFilter Data
Editor,
I am writing to commend the staff of Stocks & Commodities for its thorough and technically accurate
review of our TechniFilter software that appeared in the Product Review section of the September 1986
edition.
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that, in addition to the data produced by the Dow Jones
Market Analyzer and its recent successor the Dow Jones Market Analyzer PLUS, versions of
TechniFilter are also available for use with data produced by Technical Investor from Savant, and by
Market Analyst from Anidata.
Sincerely,
JOHN A. NAVARTE ,
Vice President
El Paso, TX