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Strategies & Market Trends : TA-Quotes Plus -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gonzongo who wrote (4016)	4/23/1998 9:09:00 AM
From: CynicalTruth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11149

I know not much about options but couldn't you just run a scan with the "Has options" statement and TA the resulting list of stocks? John

To: gonzongo who wrote (4016)	4/23/1998 9:54:00 AM
From: Ken Adams	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11149

Gonz... I've been getting my data from Primate Software Company in California. I pay $22 per month (price just went up from $19). They have virtually anything a trader would want. Stocks, options, indices, funds, futures, opts on futures. All the same price. Quotes are available by 7:30 eastern time. They offer the data in ascii or Metastock format. You build your own list of symbols, get only what you want. I currently get about 2800 symbols nightly. I get everything on the NYSE and AMEX except for warrants, preferreds and some of the nickel/dime junk. I also get about 400 +- NASDAQ symbols. This one grows weekly. When I see something going on with a stock I don't have, I simply enter it into my list. The next time I download (from an 800 number) I get as much history on that new one as I want. Or, I can go get it right now, if that's what I want. They allow 250,000 quotes monthly. I've never come close to that, even when I'm getting history. I usually pick up only 3 years of history, so that's approximately 750 quotes. A quote is open, high, low, close and volume. With options, it includes open interest, which is very important to me. Option histories consist of about the life of the option. I can't say exactly how long that is, as I never want more than about the last 3-4 weeks. Once the option expires, I dump the data. I probably follow anywhere from 5 to 25 options in a typical month. To specifically answer your question, I usually don't chart the option itself (Primate comes with its own basic charting program). It's the underlying issue that I make my option trading decisions on. I'm a very short term trader, usually. I either buy the option outright, or sell calls against the security I hold. This is an excellent way to pick up extra cash in the account, and a relatively low risk way to use options in a trading strategy. In his book "Options as a Strategic Investment", McMillan says this use of options may be the only way some people should consider options, because of the safety factor. To close, I wouldn't expect Quotes Plus to offer options for the same monthly rate they have now. Perhaps it could be an "add on" for those of us who would use it. I'd gladly pay them more for this. Ken