Keith,
I use QuotesPlus (QP2) for US EOD data. I highly recommend it. See the Quotes Plus thread for other's comments. For me, using QP2 is LIGHT YEARS ahead of downloading ASCII data to MSWIN for all US stocks. Nightly download is quick (about 2 minutes for 10K stocks, Indices), and then a few more minutes to add values to database - all automated, including data correction, stock splits, name changes. QP2 provides sophisticated scanning, and good charting, direct access to up-to-date charts from MSWIN. Other people use TC2000, AIQ and are happy with those packages too. QP2 has a demo/trial version, that I recommend you check out/play with. You will learn what I mean about "daily cycle", and why you want to keep it simple.
I have yet to find a QP2 substitute for Canadian equities. I use Dataline/Canstock (2nd vendor in your list). The exchange data I get does require filtering for 0 volume days. I use a perl script to automate this.
You need to decide how you're going to get from ASCII format into a viewable chart. MSWIN imposes its own limitations on how stock data will be stored. (Before MSWIN 6.0, you could have max. 256 symbols in a directory. Now I think it's 2000, but most other tool vendors won't be able read more than 256. There has been lots of discussion of this limitation/issue on this thread.)
Bottom line: YOU will need to create and manage symbols in separate directories. You will use MSWIN Downloader to update data for each symbol from ASCII files. You will also use MSWIN Downloader to do all maintenance in these directories. This is a non-trivial task. From my experimenting, I concluded it would consume many hours (weekends and evenings) to manage my data manually. MSWIN Downloader is a powerful tool. But YOU will be the "Database Management System" that processes ASCII data and stores it in MSWIN format. Ask yourself "How much of my time am I willing to invest each night to keep the data up-to-date?"
I suggest you take some sample ASCII EOD data and play with Downloader to create some MSWIN symbols, and then update them for several days running, to see what is involved. I decided that using MSWIN to manage data directly was not for me. I remember that, during my experiments, I occasionally corrupted the MSWIN data files for specific symbols. I couldn't recreate the problem, nor did I learn how to prevent it from happening. Once a symbol was corrupt, I had to delete the symbol and reload all data for that symbol (but remember that raw data is not stored by symbol, it's stored by day, for all symbols together). Another important lesson for me: I keep tape backup of all data each night.
Sorry for the long message. I want you to be successful with Cdn EOD data, and will be glad to learn from your success.
Regards,
Paul |
