Stocks & Commodities V. 23:3 (74-78): Product Review: MetaStock 9.0 Professional by Dennis D. Peterson

Stocks & Commodities V. 23:3 (74-78): Product Review: MetaStock 9.0 Professional by Dennis D. Peterson

MetaStock 9.0 Professional is a nonsubscription-based stock market analysis application. It needs to be used with a datafeed, which can be either real-time or end of day (EOD). Since MetaStock is a popular product among traders, a number of other packages do accept data in MetaStock format and a number of datafeeds provide data in MetaStock format. The compact disc comes with some excellent user manuals, and the technical support is outstanding and free. MetaStock is one of the software packages I use every day and have done so for several years.

DATA INTERFACES

Besides providing an interface for realtime datafeeds, specifically QCharts or eSignal, MetaStock 9.0 also accepts EOD data that you can get from fee-based sources, such as Reuters, or from free sources. The free route usually entails using a program that Equis offers (for no charge) called Downloader, which will convert the data. For example, the other day I was interested in obtaining put/call ratios. I went to the CBOE site and downloaded a spreadsheet into Excel. I deleted all columns except the date and ratio columns and revised the top rows into a single row of headers, placing above the date column and above the put/call ratios column. I saved this modified spreadsheet as a CSV file and converted it into MetaStock format via Downloader. Under the options source tab, I checked the daily option; under the options destination tab, I checked “Replace matching dates” with the “Append data to end of file” selected, and finally checked “Create new files,” making sure the “Include open & open interest” box was not checked since I had no other data.