Automation Work for eSignal Stock Trading Software User

Recently I was contacted by a technical trader who uses eSignal to scan for and execute stock trades. He had a problem for me to solve, but first I'll need to give some explanation as to what he's doing, though I must admit, he was rightfully secretive about many of the details:

Basically, each morning he uses Yahoo Finance's Stock Screener (an effective and free tool) to identify a group of stocks to watch that day, based upon a certain set of technical factors that he's developed over time (this is one secret part). He actually does this four times, each with a different set of factors. When he's done, he's got four lists of stock tickers, each of which might typically contain 20 to 50 line items, which he can export to a CSV file and open in Excel. Then what he does is create an advanced chart in eSignal for each ticker in each of the four lists, each list having a unique chart configuration and associated with unique and proprietary formulas or "studies" that he's created over time (here's the other secret part) that automatically execute trades on a stock when certain conditions are met.

The problem is that most of the really "good" trade opportunities happen very early in the morning after the opening bell. Meanwhile, he's manually creating charts for 80 to 200 tickers, which takes an hour or so, so he's missed the bulk of the good trade opportunities.

"Excel_Geek, can you help me automate the creation of these charts quickly so I don't miss all the good trades?" Sure.

So what I'd need to do is run down a list of ticker symbols in a spreadsheet, and then create a new chart using the right configuration (of the four he uses) in a whole other software program -- eSignal -- for that ticker. Huh...how do I do that?

So I got online with the technical support people for eSignal and asked some dumb questions. "Is there a way to automate the opening of a large number of advanced charts programmatically?"

"No."

Hmmmm. Now I started reaching, "How about using Shell commands? Can I do it with Shell commands?"

"No."

Really? "'No' like 'you shouldn't do that' or 'no' like 'that is not possible'?"

"It is not possible."

Really? I needed to know who I was dealing with, "Do you have a programming background?"

"No."

That's it then. I'm going to figure out how to do it, and it turns out, that it can be done, and I did it.

What I built is a spreadsheet where this trader can copy-paste in his lists of tickers, click a button, eSignal is fired up, and all of the charts are opened. Instead of an hour or so, it takes about 15-20 seconds. Not bad. He'll get those good trades now!

On the drawback side, we learned that eSignal is a bit resource-hungry, particularly when using advanced charts. With an AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual core processor 4600, 986 MHz, and 2 GB of RAM it starts to choke on around 150-160 charts open at once. Perhaps with some additional RAM and tweaking the paging file settings, we can get some better performance, but in the end, 150 simultaneous opportunities to find profitable trades is not too shabby.

I must disclose to you all that this was a Private Project rather than a $50 Project, so I won't be sharing it with all of my loyal Insiders subscribers. Sorry. However, my client was more than happy to let me generally write about the project here, and he's even expressed interest is licensing it to others if they're interested.

Interested? Shoot me a line.

Later,

Excel_Geek