Does anyone know of a program that is downloadable or even for purchase that you can enter specific things to find and then plug into public information somehow to give back your results? I am aware of several cookie-cutter screeners and sifters but none that have the specific information I want to use. . . Thanks!
Hmmm... I thought it was pretty clear. I want to download some software that I can program to screen stocks. I want to take someone's software and add my own search criteria. I do not want to make software from scratch, yet I want to program in my pieces of information I seek in a stock and be able to sift thru the entire market in seconds. Basically I want to do what CNBC, MARKETWATCH, and many many other sites offer but I want to plug in my own personal specs. I'm afraid I can't make it more simple than that. So, this must exist somewhere and I do not yet know about it. . . Thanks.
Well, on the free and simple side is yahoo, where you can search based upon price, dividends, eps, etc. http://screener.finance.yahoo.com/newscreener.html On the more expensive side is something like trade-ideas.com ($60/mo). It has dozens of pre-built pattern recognition systems (breakout of channel, MA crossover, etc) and will give real time alerts. You can modify the searches to a certain degree. As far as a piece of software that will "scan the entire market" in realtime, that's going to be expensive. You'll need to get a feed that gives you all that data. DTN and some others will provide it, but it's several $k/month. There are other web sites which will allow you to upload pieces of scripts and it will automatically run them and report when a match has been found.
You need I think to distinguish whether you are looking for Technical or Fundamental analysis. Several charting programs have utilities such as MetaStock's 'The Explorer' to scan the database and find stocks etc meeting user programmed criteria. Here's a 'Fundamental' search site: http://prosearch.businessweek.com/businessweek/general_free_search.html?mode=advanced and google: search fundamentals stocks
Wallace: Thank you so much! This may be the answer I am looking for. At least it is the closest thing so far. I still have to play with it more but on a quick glance it looks awesome! Thanks!!!!! If anyone else has other suggestions, I do welcome them. I simply want to play with "% of stock price change" and "time". I would like to be able to research both these items independently of each other and be able to go from 1 day to 10 years. (well, at least 2 years). . . A very boring project, and as you can see I do not know much about this so any advice would be great. Sorry if I was unclear to other posters, I did not know what kind of information I needed to give for an answer. - Newbee.
mr_spread, Oddly enough the program is called spread!, do your homework and, search for it. There are some shareware versions too...... Cy