QCharts 6.1 - New Features

ICE Data Services -

QCharts 6.1 - New Features

Hot Lists, Sector Lists Updated
Hot Lists and Sector Lists, while not new to QCharts, are now sourced by the eSignal network, bringing a higher degree of accuracy and reliability to your existing Hot Lists and Sector Lists. For those who haven’t explored these features in QCharts yet, the following bullets provide a review:

  • Hot Lists are powerful pre-built scans that look through the markets to identify the best trading opportunities and update them automatically every 30 seconds. There are the traditional gainers, losers and volume lists here but also unique scans, such as Unusual Volume, Most Volatile and Trade Rate Hot Lists, the last of which displays the fastest-trading stocks in the previous minute. This allows a momentum trader to see what is moving right now and react accordingly. 
     
  • Sector Lists are a quick way to pull up symbols that are in specific sectors. This unique feature will insert symbols into a quote sheet for additional sorting and analysis. For example, you open your workspace in the morning and notice that the Dow Utilities is up strong. Digging further, you notice that natural gas is making a move favoring the providers in that sector. By clicking on the "Import Sector Lists" icon, you access the complete list of companies in that business space for further investigation.

New Data Fields
In addition to adding numerous lists, we’re also adding 50+ new data fields, such as Short Interest, Float, 12 Month % Total Return, % Insider Owned, 200-Day Moving Average and many more. We do know that not all data fields have been carried over from the Continuum network, so we are actively working toward bringing them to the eSignal network in a forthcoming 2010 release.

Multiple Comment Fields
We have had many requests from the QCharts community for the ability to add multiple Comment fields to the QCharts Quote Sheet window. The ability to include multiple layers of notes per symbol ensures that your trading evaluations, stop levels, entry points and other annotations can remain organized.

Enhancements

Time & Sales Performance
In some of the situations where QCharts was pausing during the market, we found that the Time & Sales window was downloading excessive amounts of data when compared to the amount of data commonly looked at using this window. We also took this time to scrutinize how data was being internally stored and worked on ways to improve it further. The result is much improved speed with a focus on being able to change symbols quickly.

Change Multiple Lines at Once
Nearly all QCharts clients use multiple charts, and those who use line tools create more than one line on a chart. As such, we looked at ways that lines could be edited together to save time. We came up with three different ways this could be accomplished (via a right click of a line). Change All Lines for Symbol – This allows you to change the characteristics of all trend lines on the specific symbol.

  • Change All Lines of Type – This allows you to change the characteristics of all trend lines for the chosen type.
  • Change All Lines for Symbol of Type – This is a combination of the above two.

 

One thing to note about this feature is that you can choose to edit the lines from a chart via a right click or go into the Edit Lines function and choose Workspace. Changes in this mode will take place across the entire workspace versus within only the selected chart.

Abbreviate Time Labels
There is a new option for displaying the time labels at the bottom of an intraday chart. Under View -> Preferences, the Display tab has a new option called "Abbreviate Time Labels". When checked, QCharts will behave in its usual way. When unchecked, the scale will expand to include more precise labels based on the actual times of the bars and the selected intervals.

Go To Date
You now have the ability to scroll back to a specific time in a chart quickly with the new "Go To Date" function in charts. This can be found via the right-click menu. Using this, in combination with the extended intraday data launched with QCharts 6.0.3, there’s no need to scroll back and further back with your mouse or with the arrow keys. You’ll be able to jump back precisely with a single command.

Equity Display Precision Expanded
The "Set equity display precision to two decimal places" option (also found under the View -> Preferences, Display tab) will now round most technical studies to 2 decimal places. This saves precious screen real estate for more of the information that’s important to you.