Doc,
It’s a program called Candle Power Plus. But it’s no longer marketed or supported, which is a shame.
The essence of the program is this. A basket of ten, Western-style indicators is used to vote on whether to buy or sell. (The indicators are the usual suspects: MACD, CCI, RSI, EMV, etc.) The votes can be weighted. A majority vote creates a buy or sell signal. Separately, the program creates buy/sell signals using Candle Pattern Analysis.
The programmer, Norm North, and his collaborator, Greg Morris, did extensve back-testing using the 100 stocks in the OEX as a test base. They found that combining the two methods of producing signals offered very superior results.
It wouldn’t take much programming to do a knock-off version. Or if you want to spend some money, you can buy TA programs like OmniTrader which will do the same sort of scanning and signal generating. It all depends on one’s means, needs, and purposes. If you’re really want to get into trading systems building and testing, take a look at Ami Broker, which is as powerful as MetaStock and much cheaper, though much, much harder to code.
A low-buget knock-off that is actually really, really sound is StockAnalyze. It comes with a library of trading systems that are easy to modify, and it pulls its data from Yahoo. So maintenance costs are zero.
Also, depending how proficient you are with spreadsheets, nearly any TA signaling program can be replicated in them. Perry Kaufman did a lot of his work in spreadsheets, and plenty of books deal with the how-tos.
If you’re tracking and trading just a couple dozen stocks, the overhead of a signal generating program isn’t necessary. But if you’re trying to slam through a list of 500 items, an scanner is absolutely crucial, because it can pick out in mere seconds the 1% to 2% that might be worth hand-charting and digging into further.
Again, all of this stuff depends on one’s means, needs, and purposes. I got into programming early, back in the days of punch cards. Remember LISP? I hated it. But I liked Fortran. I don’t remember much of the code, but the discipline of telling a computer what to do carries forward.
Charlie
