After someone mentioned it here, I went out to Mach6's site
mach6.net and signed up to see what they had. Today I received an email from the Project Manager for Mach 6, and below is an excerpt of his letter and my reply. There are three reasons I am posting this:
1. He and others obviously lurk or screen for things to improve their website/services/business. I am sure that if you post your ideas/needs in response to this post, he will probably take note of it.
2. There is no Gap postings that handle modified gaps online, and a site that provides that would be extrememly useful to a trader.
3. If someone takes the time to read some of our stuff and offer to provide something useful like Gaps to their website, its probably a fair assumption that the other Mach6 software does something equally useful for traders. I hadn't downloaded it until this morning, but will go try it out this week.
His letter:
From your SI thread I gather that your readers are short-term traders,
of whom we hope Mach 6 will be of benefit to (once we get the realtime data in). We're planning on rolling out v1.1 next week, along with a new website and realtime data by the middle of November.
I was wondering what sort of features we could put in Mach 6 so that it would be an essential tool to you. The last few messages on the SI thread have been about gap up/gap downs. Although the website is not our primary product, we do have the data available to calculate and post those gap up/gap downs at times during the day. To you, what would signify a gap up/gap down, and at what times during the day would you find those values best updated? How may do you need listed?
Hutchison Avenue Software Corporation
hasc.com Montreal, Quebec
In terms of Gaps, the best times to notify are at Open and then the price of those stocks at 10:30. In a perfect world, the
stockswould be separateed not only by gap Up and Gap Down, but Full and Partial. A Full gap having the classic definition
of opening above the previous day's high (or low or a gap down). A partial gap would merely have to open above or below
the previous Close. the latter category has a lot of stocks, however, so one tends to look for those that are gapping down or
up at least a point above the previous close. Looking at VRTS for last Tuesday,or XCIT for Friday would show that
although they did not qualify as Full Gaps, they were in tremendous movmemnt. Another way to do it would be to calculate
the Gap as of 9:45 instead of at open, as there is a lot of preopen and at-open activity that one visually screens out to
determine the actual stocks movement for the opening half hour. If the former two were in place, with perhaps a 15 or 30 minute update of where the stock had gone since then would be very useful. Real time updates are insignifcant in playing gaps for the most mpart, as once one has a stock triggered (ie, they missed the opening gap), what they then look for is the reversal indication or continued trend. Those
one normally watches with the specific stock streaming quote or chart. Once exiting a position intrady, they could then revisit
your Gap list to see what is now worth joining as a long or short.
By the way, thanks for asking.
Scott McCormick |
