V. 6:3 (87-88): Quick-Scans

QUICK-SCANS

I.Q. MASTER

Westport Research Associates, Inc.

6102 Arlington

Raytown, MO, 64133

(800) 255-8310

(816) 358-8990

Price: $1,275 (exchange fees extra) Equipment: IBM XT/AT or compatible with 640K of memory, hard disk drive (or two floppies), and EGA color or Hercules monochrome display.

How about a quote machine working in the background of your PC? It sits there on its own board collecting and storing information from a satellite feed until you want to see what's happening in the market. Then you call it up and you suddenly have real-time quotes and charts right before your eyes—as well as some popular indicators on the chart. If you'd like some background, full textual news pages are constantly updated on everything from financial markets to the 5-minute old crop USDA crop report. You can even get mail directly from your trading advisor over the private mail feature!

Stocks & Commodities has had Westport's system running on an XT for about four months and it's awfully convenient. It's the only Beta test version I've ever seen that never had any bugs and worked without tinkering. In fact, the only downside to all this is that it takes two slots in my old four-slot machine—one for the board and one for output to the separate graphics monitor.

I.Q. Master handles all futures contracts and their options. You can select from an on-screen menu, view chart screens, quote screens, or options screens at the push of a button. We can attest that the system is easy to use without a manual because when we got it, the manual was virtually non-existent compared to the current 200-page guidebook. Just explore the on-screen choices and if you get lost hit ESC to go back where you came from. This is the way software should work.