I have mentioned a couple of times a Windows application that will do charts somewhat similar to what Saul does manually. Brittlerock made me aware that Saul also marks buys and sells on his charts and asked if something like that might be possible in the PE Chart application. Well, I took that as a challenge and have added the ability to record buys and sells and put markers on the chart to represent each trade. When you hover the mouse pointer over any marker a small popup will give some details. You can also set colors for the markers to whatever pleases you in the Options panel available from the menu bar. I hope anyone using the application finds the addition useful.
The application is named PETChart.exe to reflect the addition of Trades to Price and Earnings and can be found in the Google Drive folder here…
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B40ZcniWzxoNNGl0d1hfdE04Mk…
To use it just download it into the same folder you use for PEChart.exe so that it will find the earnings data file you already have.
Note to brittlerock…I just put a new version on Drive that should avoid markers hiding each other.
Steve
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I caught a small problem with the trade markers that caused them to move if a chart was refreshed by changing colors or any other means. I’ve put a new copy on Google Drive that resolves that problem.
Also, I didn’t give many details earlier on how to enter trades although it’s probably fairly obvious, I hope. Once you select a company there will be a Trade button to the right of the symbol. Just click on that to enter trades. There is a checkbox that can be checked to keep the window open for multiple trades for that company. There is no way currently to edit or delete trades once they are entered. They are saved in file trades.txt in the same folder as the application. You can edit that file with Notepad if needed. The record format is B or S for Buy/Sell, date, shares and price.
Steve
1 Like
Steve,
I want to thank you personally via a board post so that other faithful readers of this board (who are also Windows users) become aware of how useful this application is. I don’t expect Saul to trade in his paper, he’s been doing it his way for a long time and I’m sure there would be a considerable conversion burden for him to migrate to an electronic chart. And he’s never mentioned it, but I suspect upon occasion he makes notations on his charts - I would.
But for those of you like me who are just beginning to get organized ala Saul, and have no charts and no historical compilation of investment data, this application is genuinely a useful time-saver. It does not draw charts exactly the way Saul suggests, but I feel that it captures the same intent and presents a graphical representation of the information in a useful and informative manner. If you don’t have any charts and you don’t have historical records of your company’s earnings, let me encourage you to download this application and at least give it a try - you can always revert to paper charts if you want to later, but I seriously doubt that you will want to.
I suppose their might be a concern about whether the application will be maintained as Microsoft roles out new versions of the OS. As far as I know, Steve’s not making any money from this, so it’s up to him to test his application as the OS roles and update as required. I think this is a minor concern. Microsoft makes an effort to make new OS versions backward compatible for quite a long time. And so far anyway, Steve has been responsive to repairing bugs and simply improving the convenience of the application. The only thing I would recommend is a version number and release date displayed on the new options screen so it would be easy to tell if one had the latest update.
Thanks again Steve, I for one greatly appreciate your efforts on creating this application and making it available to whoever wants it. Just another example of the great community Saul has helped to create with this board.
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Steve,
If you would be open to the idea open sourcing your project and moving it onto a GitHub or BitBucket repository (so you the onus isn’t always on you for updates) I would be happy to help.
I come from a development background with familiarity in C# and WPF and may be able to help.
Send me a note if you’d appreciate having other contributors.
Best,
–Kevin
1 Like
Steve,
I really like the application, thanks so much for your generosity.
My only trouble with it is that I use multiple computers to look around, so if there was anyway to centralize where it is located that would make it an unbelievable resource. Even sharing work between users, like inputing new earnings data, would crowd source the legwork.
I know that is probably a naive wish, but one I would put out there!
That said, my gratitude again, nice work
Gator
My only trouble with it is that I use multiple computers to look around, so if there was anyway to centralize where it is located that would make it an unbelievable resource. Even sharing work between users, like inputing new earnings data, would crowd source the legwork.
I know that is probably a naive wish, but one I would put out there!
Gator,
I think that is an excellent suggestion and does make more sense in many ways than individual Windows applications. I don’t have the knowledge to set something like that up. When I first posted about this application I did mostly for the coding challenge and as something I might use myself and offered to share nevercontent (Neil) mentioned that he had done some work to set up something on his “BoardKeep”. That would likely be a better solution in many ways. Maybe everyone could encourage him to continue to pursue that idea.
Here is a link to his post.
http://discussion.fool.com/hey-steve-cool-i-built-a-prototype-of…
Steve
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brittlerock,
Thanks for the kind words and the feedback you gave me directly to help make the application better. I see no reason why it would not work on Win10 since there’s nothing exotic in it, just basic forms programming. I probably wouldn’t find out for quite a while since I’ll likely put off “upgrading” for as long as possible. I’m on Win7 and don’t have much hope of Win10 being better from my perspective. It will have Win8 roots and I absolutely hated and refused to use Win8. I understand the motive to have a common OS for all of the modern platforms but it seemed to mean that everyone got dragged down to the lowest common denominator and for legacy Windows platforms it just didn’t work, in my opinion.
At this time I don’t see many updates (or any?) coming, at least that’s what I’m hoping. If anyone is using the application and finds any problems don’t hesitate to tell me about them.
Steve
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Thank you Steve, I very much appreciate all your hard work in developing this application!
Rodney
1 Like