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1996-02-10
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Stock Utilities
written by
Terry Blount
The following utilities were written to help track, analyze and spot
trends in the stock marked based on using stock market quotes provided
by Planet Connect (and maybe other services using the same format).
These utilities are provided for entertainment purposes. Don't invest
your hard earned money on any stock because of trends these utilities
may seem to suggest! The information fields in the quotes provided by
Planet Connect are formatted as follows: Symbol, Last Sale Volume, Last
sale price, Open price, Highest price today, Lowest price today, current
bid, current offer, Total volume today.
COMPARE.EXE
This is the main (and most powerful) utility. It can check all 30,000
listings from any two quote files and compare the changes in each stock
and calculate the percentage of loss or gain from one quote to another.
It was written to run as fast as possible so there can be a problem when
there are more than two stocks in succession missing from the base file.
While the program is running it will be flashing the names of the stocks
it is working on. If it stops flashing those names and starts printing
several asterisk (*) on the screen then has encountered a problem. Press
ctrl-break and then remove the stock listed on your screen (that came
from the first (base) file) when the problem occurred. A utility named
"TakeOut.exe" is included to make this easy. This doesn't happen often
but if there is a sharp decline in the market there could be a lot of
stocks disappearing. As long as you are checking the prices of a group of
stocks that have extracted by "StokPick.exe" you'll probably never run
into this problem.
When you run Compare.exe you need the name of the oldest stock quote on
the command line as the first parameter... and the name of the newer
stock quote file on the command line as the second parameter. If you
include a minus (-) as the third parameter the stocks that declined in
value will also be included... otherwise only the stocks that showed a
increase in price will be listed in the outfile. The name of the
outfile is determined by the name of the two quotes. For example, if the
first quote file is named "Quote11" and the second file is named
"Quote22" the name of the outfile will be "11-22" It may be a little
extra work, but when you extract the Quotes.asc files from the archives
it helps you keep them organized and makes these utilities work better
if you rename the "Quotes.asc" to QUOTExx ....where the "xx" is the
day the PCSTOKxx archive was created.
This is the format that Compare.exe saves the information to:
Stock Symbol - Percentage Change - Base quote Price - Last Quote Price
When the base quote price and last quote price are written the decimal
is intentionally left out in order to make it easier for some programs
to add a column of numbers. A price such as 1075 is actually 10 3/4.
* Remember this: When a stock has lost value the percentage of change
that is calculated by "Compare.exe" is NOT the actual percentage the
stock dropped... rather it calculates the percentage the stock will
have to recover in order to regain the original value. For example:
If a stock is selling for $10 and it drops to $5 that is an actual loss
of %50 ...however, this same stock will have to increase by %100 in
order to break even. Compare.exe reports the stock as 100- in the
percentage column.
Note: Stocks that aren't listed in fraction format AND stocks that have
an asterisk in the price quote are ignored.
MYSTOCKS.EXE
This utility converts a list of stocks (in a column format) into a
format that is used by "StokPick.exe" You can easily track several
portfolios simply by listing the stock symbols in a column and placing
them in double quotes is separate ascii files. For example, one of your
list may look like this:
"CHEV"
"GE"
"GM"
"MMM"
"XON"
Mystocks will reformat the list and save it to a file name Mystocks.lst
If you don't list the name of your ascii file on the command line
Mystock.exe will default to look for the list saved under the name
Mystocks. This step will allow you to track a portfolio that can include
up to a thousand stocks and it makes the extraction process very fast.
STOKPICK.EXE
This utility exacts the list of stocks you want to track from the 30
thousand (give or take a few) that are listed in the reports. It
saves the selected stock quotes to a file named !Picked. You can then
compare the "!Picked" list to a more current quote and quickly find out
how well the portfolio is doing.
GREATER.EXE
If you combine several stock quote files... say the closing quote file
every Wednesday... all into a single file... you can then run
"StokPick.exe" and extract the stocks you want to track from that giant
file... and then use the utility "FRA2DEC.EXE" to convert the stock
prices to decimal format... you'll then be ready to run "GREATER.EXE" to
show you which stocks are showing an increase in price each week.
Terry Blount
P.O. Box 36
Bayou La Batre
Alabama 36509