I bought Amibroker about two years ago. Its a great program for the cost (< $200 ) and you can use free Yahoo EOD data. It'll cost a few bucks for real time data. I'm not a programmer either, but I was able to set up simple EOD scans like your trying to do, after investing about 4-5 hours going over code examples on the website and help section. The owner of the company had a very good response time when I had basic questions. If you take the time to learn some really simple code you'll find you won't have to limit your scanning ideas or indicators. If you get into one of the pre-canned scanners you'll most likely want to change or add something that it can't handle. Also, you will pay one time and not have monthly charges. On the negative side, you'll have to download the EOD data on a lot of symbols, which of course, is one of the positives of an online scanner.
I found Metastock's Explorer feature to be very easy to get up and running with. For me it was very intuitive - more so than Tradestation. However I do have years of Excel behind me...................... I currently use Excel for some things like freefloat tracking and simple intraday scanning but if you are scanning a lot of stocks for setups that cross reference over a number of bars then in my view MS TS or similar is the better way to go than Excel.
Investor/RT I use TC2005, works well, but does not have CCI built in. You can add it via the code as demonstrated here: http://www.worden.com/training/default.aspx?g=posts&t=807 or http://www.tradeon.com/tradeon/tc2000/custom_indicators.html Investor/RT CCI does look easier to work with: http://www.linnsoft.com/tour/techind/cci.htm smitty
Haven't used metastock in years but it is easy to generate scans with its explorer. You can reference canned indicators with a very simple script language which can be run realtime. If you focus on just a few markets, you can use javascript in eSignal to accomodate fairly sophisticated requirement criteria. Once setups are coded, it's also easy to backtest them. Haven't tried it but you can also have them automatically executed. good luck.
www.aiqsystems.com Hundreds of canned technical scans.....the ability to merge them and adjust all parameters. And when you get used to there language it is very simple to create your own custom scans using just about any criteria you can think of. Cheap also 59 EOD with delayed data or 79 real time everything. Backtesting...portfolio testing..etc etc to much to list. not affiliated,,,been using them for years and love the product.
have you looked at good ol' Stockcharts scanner? I think it would handle the example you gave; and if you're using/paying-for stockcharts anyway.... On the other hand, I have found it near impossible to use for things like finding "dryup volume" a la Hershey, etc.. also, I do not believe it has any info on float, short%, etc.; and it can not even sort for stocks which have options; which surprised the hell out of me. Seems like that'd be a popular criteria to select by. Also, it's an EOD thing....don't believe it takes into acct. intraday data.
d9d Actually thats what I use now but I'm still fairly limited in my understanding with these things but I'm learning to use them better everyday (no choice) lol.
Is there any scanner that does a good job at screening for patterns? I think this is the main shortfall of these programs nothing will ever replace the trained eye. I think you can just create and update a list of gainers and scan it manually. The other thing I would scan for is stocks that have been consolidating for months or flatliners, these would be for investment purpose . I don't know any online scanner that can do that, do you know any?
I've tried several scanners, stockcharts, Dragon @ OX, Stockfetcher and Trade ideas (during free week @BD), and smallcapcenter tools. I still use Stockcharts, smallcapcenter and Stockfetcher. I have written my own screen filters @SF including ones that scan for optionable stocks and have recently been reading posting of some old timers. The old filter postings have lots of capabilities with very simple statements. The following is an example from one the old posts is filters on BB with and looks very promising. You can download their software and play around with delayed data for free. show stocks where the Bollinger width(30) has reached a new 1 year low And draw Bollinger(30)