PE Chart application revision

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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When I saw pictures of A.J.'s graphs I decided to go back into my charting application to see how difficult it would be to do something similar in addition to the simple line plots I had. It wasn’t too difficult to add even though I ran into other issues that slowed me down some. So, I added a price plot that shows the high, low and close for each month. At that point it was very simple to do monthly OHLC (open-high-low-close) and candlestick plots as well. Before there were two options for chart style, daily line with a PE range and quarterly price and earnings line plots. Now there are six price plot options that can be mixed with earnings line or PE range plots.

I didn’t want to put that many options on the main screen so I added an Options item to the menu strip that will bring up an options panel that allows for plot color changes, a choice of the six price plot types and the two earnings/PE plot types.

Saul mentioned that one nice thing about his paper plots was that it was easy to compare two (or more?) companies by just pulling out another chart. It’s also simple enough to do that with this application by simply starting another copy of the program.

This picture shows four copies running at once on my screen just to show the ability to compare and to show some of the plot type combinations. Also shown is an Options panel.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B40ZcniWzxoNenZkUFhqSndhZm…

The new version of the application is on Google Drive in the same folder as before. Here’s the link again.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B40ZcniWzxoNNGl0d1hfdE04Mk…

Hopefully this is the last version for a while (or ever). I started this project because I thought it was something I might use and I wanted to improve my Windows/c# coding skills. While I have been coding for a long time, I’ve only recently tried to do Windows applications. So, this was a good exercise. I’m enjoying using it so far and believe I will continue to get use out of it. I hope a few others find it useful as well. I’m pretty sure I won’t convert Saul, and that was never my goal. While I think this program can give a similar visual picture of what price and earnings are doing, what it can’t do it get the relevant numbers and relationships into the brain as deeply as doing manual charts. That forces you to actually think about the numbers as you plot them…or at least I believe that it would.

One last note…I don’t remember if I mentioned this earlier, but if anyone does use this application it’s simple to share earnings values with someone. A list of date and EPS values (separtated by a comma, space or tab) can be pasted into the panel used to add earnings/companies. To capture them from the application just drag the mouse pointer across the Date and EPS columns and rows, the press CTRL+C to copy. Then paste them into a post, e-mail, etc. to share. To add shared values into the application just click in the box on the Add panel and use CTRL+V to paste.

For example, the numbers for BOFI would look like this…


04/30/2015	1.35
01/29/2015	1.26
11/04/2014	1.20
08/07/2014	1.09
05/06/2014	1.00
02/05/2014	0.91
11/05/2013	0.85
08/07/2013	0.78
05/07/2013	0.74
02/06/2013	0.70
11/08/2012	0.67
08/09/2012	0.64
05/03/2012	0.58
02/02/2012	0.54
11/08/2011	0.58

Comments, criticisms or questions are welcome.

Steve

9 Likes
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Steve,
That is a great Job. Thanks for putting all the hard work into this.

Andy

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Wow, Steve! This is better than it was. The log graph really looks useful now. I didn’t mention it before, I just kind of ignored it. I glad someone did. Excellent work!

1 Like
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Steve,

Just wanted to say thanks for putting this tool together. It’s working great for my needs. For someone with a hectic work and home schedule, finding and entering a companies EPS each quarter makes it much more manageable.

A.D.

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Steve,
You may have seen the discussion about charting frequency. Saul noted that he puts a “b” for buy or “s” for sell on his chart and maintains a record of how many shares and at what price.

Maybe you’re all done messing about with your application, but would it be a big deal to be able to track transactions? Just a B/S symbol on the chart at the appropriate date and maybe display the details with a hoover or mouse click?

Just a thought. It would be really cool if you provided that functionality.

Thanks for what you’ve already done. I appreciate and use your application.

br

1 Like
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You may have seen the discussion about charting frequency. Saul noted that he puts a “b” for buy or “s” for sell on his chart and maintains a record of how many shares and at what price.

Hi Brittlerock, What I actually do is have a B for a fixed number of dollars worth of purchase, not a fixed number of shares. That way B’s on all my stock charts are equivalent. If I make a large initial purchase over a week or two, I may have a dozen or more B’s, but if I add a little later at a higher price, it may be just one or two. (Paper is just more flexible that way). That gives me a great visual summary of what I bought and when.

Aside from that I don’t keep any record of how many shares and at what price. If I want details it’s always there online at my broker.

Saul

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Aside from that I don’t keep any record of how many shares and at what price.

I need to correct that. I do have a distribution spread sheet (on my computer) with how many shares of each stock I have in each account. It adds up the total number of shares of each company (combining all the accounts), but they are not attached to the stock price I paid.

I also have a spread sheet with the total number of shares of each stock times the current price to give me my current portfolio totals which I use for the progress of my portfolio as a whole. The spread sheet prepares a bar graph of the total amount I have in each stock automatically, which gives me a visual of the relative sizes of my positions in descending order.

I hope this helps,

Saul

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Saul, thanks for the correction - I was writing from what I remembered rather than going back to see what you actually wrote. I need to exercise more caution about going off of memory.