StockCharts Blogs - Chip Anderson

Seeing Ads on Wikipedia? If So, You Have a Virus

Just a quick heads up about a new security issue to worry about.  If you see ads on Wikipedia, you have a virus on your computer.  Here's a link to all the details.   I mention this to everyone here at StockCharts because: 1.) chances are you visit Wikipedia often and 2.) these kind of tricks are not always limited to Wikipedia and may cause problems with our site as well.  We are not currently aware of anything that is specifically targetting StockCharts.com, but that could change.  It's worth spending a couple of moments reviewing the information about the Wikipedia version to see if it affects you.

- Chip

May 12th Public ChartList of the Week - Dirk Hettrich's "Broad Look To Various Markets"

Dirk Hettrich's "Broad Look To Various Markets" contains some seriously long-term charts that he's been commenting on for years - back to 2005 in many cases.   These long-term monthly and weekly charts are focused on the relationships between the different markets out there including Gold, Currencies, and different Market Caps.  Dirk also mixes overlaid candlestick charts with point and figure charts and performance charts to bring multiple perspectives to his analysis.  Here's an example:

Dirk's long-term approach - developed over many years - is worth a closer look which is why his list is this week's "Publick ChartList of the Week."  Enjoy!

- Chip

Public ChartList of the Week: Gary Berkley's "Simple Systems"

We're continuing to highlight our new Public ChartList area.  There are many, many great people there putting a ton of time and effort into creating some great chart collections and sharing them with everyone.  If you haven't seen it yet, you owe it to yourself to to check it out.  (And if you looked at the old version and hated it, you definitely should check out the new version!)

When I look at the Public ChartList area, my eye instinctively goes down to the lists in the middle of the ranking page.  These are the up-and-comers, the underdogs, the potential diamonds in the rough.  They are worth a little extra energy each week to see what they are up to which is why I'm going to start highlighting them here in my blog.

Here's a terrific example of a middle-of-the-pack list that is worth some of everyone's time: Gary Berkley's "Simple Systems".

ChartCon 2012 Speaker List and Agenda Updated

ChartCon 2012 - our annual conference that's 100% dedicated to StockCharts.com users - is fast approaching.  In case you didn't hear, it is being held on August 10th and 11th in Seattle, Washington.  We've just finalized this year's agenda and speaker list and I wanted to let everyone know that some things have changed since we first announced the conference back in November.

First off, I am thrilled to announce that we've added two additional speakers to the program.  Greg Schnell, the author behind our very popular "Canadian Technician" blog will be presenting as will Gatis Roze, author of our new "Traders Journal" blog.  Both Greg and Gatis will be sharing their approaches for using the tools on StockCharts to analyze the markets and find great investing opportunities.

Unfortunately, I also have to announce that Carl Swenlin, the driving force behind DecisionPoint.com, will not be able to attend the conference.  His daughter (and co-author of the website) Erin Swenlin Heim will be presenting in his place however.

In addition we've rearranged and reworked several of the sessions to make things flow better.  You can see the complete agenda by clicking on this link and scrolling down.  Highlights now include:

• John Murphy discussing his upcoming new book on Intermarket Analysis
• A big announcement about some new community support programs from StockCharts
• Gatis Roze's "Tensile Trading" presentation
• The eight skills that all StockCharts experts need to know
• An hour long, in-depth session on writing Technical Scans
• Arthur Hill and John Murphy's current take on the markets with Q&A
• Detailed presentations from Tom Bowley, Richard Rhodes and Greg Schnell about how they analyse the markets with StockCharts
• A sneak peek at the next big improvements from StockCharts and much more

And that's in addition to the Northwest Wine Tasting event and the big private dinner we're having at the Boeing Museum of Flight!

There is still a limited number of seats available for ChartCon 2012.  This is THE conference for StockCharts.com users like yourself.  Don't be left out.  Click here to learn more and to reserve your seat.

I hope to see you there,
- Chip 

 

 

Announcing "The Traders Journal" - A New Blog Full of Real-World Trading Lessons

Today we're pleased to announce the addition of Gatis Roze to our terrific collection of authors and educators here at StockCharts.  Gatis is well known throughout the Seattle area as an investing teacher.  He has taught sold-old classes at the local college here for over a decade and has been an avid StockCharts.com user for almost as long.  Gatis' students - most of whom are established investors and traders - sign up for his courses again and again to learn about real-world investing and they are never disappointed.  But because those classes have been limited in size, Gatis has recently decided to branch out.  One of the results of that decision is his new blog here at StockCharts.

The blog is called "The Traders Journal" and will contain lessons learned from over 25 years of active trading and investing.  Gatis is a huge proponent of constantly writing down everything that happens in a journal and then periodically reviewing and distilling that journal down into a collection of lessons and best practices.

"The Traders Journal" will be a collection of articles based on lessons from Gatis' personal trading journal.  Each week, typically on Friday, he'll add another gem that can help you become a better investor.  His first article - titled "Double Your Money - Buy on Rumors" - is now available in the "Blogs" area of our website.  Everyone should take 3 minutes and read it.  If you like what you see, feel free to add a comment at the bottom of his post.  Gatis would love to hear from you.

Welcome Gatis!

- Chip

Use OpenDNS to Help Avoid Connection Problems

(I'm reposting this blog article from 2010 because the advice is still 100% accurate. Moving to OpenDNS is one of the best ways to improve your internet experience. - Chip)

Earlier this week, we started getting reports from several of our users that they couldn't connect to our website anymore.  This was very strange because 1.) we hadn't changed anything and, 2.) clearly most of our users could connect just fine.

After some investigation, we noticed that the people that were having connection problems all used "shaw.ca" as their ISP.  Some more testing revealed that for some unknown reason, the DNS servers at shaw.ca were missing our DNS record.

(Background:  A "DNS Server" is a computer that converts an Internet name like "www.stockcharts.com" into a series of numbers like "66.150.15.60" that your computer can then use to actually connect to our website.  If the DNS server loses our numbers, your computer cannot find us.)

Now typically most people use whatever DNS server their ISP tells them to use.  You might remember typing some numbers into a dialog box labelled "DNS Server" back when you first set up your Internet connection.  Unfortunately, many ISP's are not diligent in maintaining their DNS servers.  This can lead  to all kinds of problems such as slow Internet times and, in the case of shaw.ca this week, missing websites.

Fortunately, there is a MUCH better way.

OpenDNS.com is a free service that provides a set of rock solid, super-fast DNS servers to anyone who wants to use them.  To use the OpenDNS servers, all you need to do is replace your ISP's DNS addresses with the OpenDNS addresses.  Complete instructions can be found by watching the "OpenDNS Basic" video on this page:

http://www.opendns.com/support/videos

Using OpenDNS.com has the additional advantage of protecting you from accidentally visiting dangerous websites.  It will warn you when you try to open a site that other users have flagged as dangerous.

We have used OpenDNS here at our offices for two years now and I have used it at my house for just as long.  I _strongly_ recommend them to anyone that uses the Internet - especially the good people who use "shaw.ca."  

- Chip

P.S. Several of the shaw.ca people changed their DNS settings to use the OpenDNS servers and their connection problems went away instantly.

Thanks to Everyone That Attended Our SCU Seminar in Los Angeles!

I just got back from Los Angeles where we held our first ever SCU Seminar down at Marina del Rey.  It was a wonderful event with a room full of terrific StockCharts.com users.  We spent 8 hours going over the website's most important features in detail and while that sounds like a lot of time, I thought the day flew by very quickly.  Everyone seemed engaged and very interested in learning as much as they could about things like the "Ribbon" technique, the 3 types of indicator overlays, John Murphy's take on the markets, and much more.

Several people came up to me after the seminar and said that they learned much more than they expected to.  One person said they thought they were a pretty experienced StockCharts user and therefore expected to learn maybe one or two new things over the course of the day - however they said they actually learned 2 or 3 new things each hour of the seminar!

Our next seminar is in Seattle on June 16th.  There are just a few more slot left for that one.  Click here for more information.  We also will be holding a seminar in New York City in October.  Click here if you are interested in that.

Finally, voting for our final 2012 city has been narrowed down to the FINAL FOUR!  Dallas, Orlando, San Francisco, and Toronto are battling it out right now.  If you are interested in attending our SCU Seminar in one of those cities, please click here and register your vote right now!  Voting ends on April 1st.

- Chip

So Long Europe (At Least for Now)

Today we are removing European-based charts from our system.  As I mentioned in a couple of previous announcements, we did not receive the support we needed from our customers to justify the increased cost of providing European data on our website.

At this point, everyone who is a paying subscriber for one of our European services should have been contacted by our billing team with the options available to them.  Those that chose to stay with StockCharts (yea!) and focus on North American markets will notice that their account has now been converted into an ExtraRT account.

If for some reason you are a paying subscriber to one of our European services and you did not hear from us, please contact our Customer Support team immediately.

If you disagree with this decision and are disappointed/frustrated/furious/unhappy/etc. an online iPetition has been started where you can let us know that you think we should bring back our European service.  Click here to sign it.  We will be watching that petition to see if it gets enough signatures to justify adding that data back.

In case you are wondering about specifics, this change means that we are:

• Removing all LSE and Euronext ticker symbols (.L, .DE and .EU) from our system.
• Deleting all saved charts that reference .L, .DE or .EU symbols
• Removing all predefined scan results based on LSE, German or Euronext stocks
• Deleting all Bullish Percent symbols that are based on LSE, German or Euronext stocks
• Converting all European stock indexes back into "End-of-Day" indexes - specifically $DAX,$AEX,$BEL,$CAC,$N100,$N150,$PSI, and $FTSE
• Remove LSE, German or Euronext based groups from our scanning tools

Again, we are not happy about this change and are doing it because it is necesary from a business perspective.  Hopefully there will come a point in the future where this data can be reincorporated into the website in a more successful manner.

- Chip

Updated Look with Some iPad Support for SharpCharts

In case you haven't noticed yet, we've updated the look of our SharpCharts Workbench page.  We think the new look is more modern, cleaner and more helpful for new users.  In addition, we've tweaked it to make the workbench a little easier for iPad users.  Finally, for many users there are a couple of nice performance improvements.

The updated look includes nicer visual boundaries for each area of the page and icons to make the important links easier to find and use.  The icons also allowed us to shorten are reorganize some of the links.

The great news is that for people that use Google Chrome, Apple's Safari and similar browsers, we were also able to decrease the vertical size of the upper area.  Not by a ton mind you - 4 pixels - but for people with smaller screens, every verical pixel counts.

Unfortunately, for people that use IE or Firefox, the verticle size increased by 3 pixles despite our best efforts.  If that is an issue for you, please see this blog post about ways you can optimize your screen.

As a side note, Internet Explorer remains a "problem child" for web programmers.  Even the latest version does lots of things "wrong" which we have to work around (and it gets way worse if you have an old version).  If you use StockCharts.com regularly with Internet Explorer, take a moment to try out either Google Chrome, Opera, or Apple Safari (which also runs under Windows) and see what you've been missing (i.e. faster load times and better looking pages).

We also made a change that should help people that use an iPad with our SharpCharts Workbench page.  iPad users will notice that all of the controls on the page are bigger than they used to be which should make it easier for you to use them with a finger-based tablet.

(Before you write in and ask, we still do not have any specific plans to create an iPad app.  Why?  Because it would look and work pretty much exactly like our website does now when you access it via Safari on the iPad.  Our general plan is to continue slowly tweaking our current website to make it more tablet friendly.)

One piece of feedback we've gotten from several people about the new look has to do with the repositioning of the "Forward" and "Back" arrows used for navigating your saved charts.  The arrows were enlarged and separated to make it more apparent what they do so that more people would start to use them (they have to this point been a fairly under-used feature of the page).

Several people have pointed out that it is somewhat more inconvenient to move your mouse over to the upper left to click the "Next" arrow.  While we agree, I want to make sure that everyone is aware of a keyboard shortcut that make clicking on those arrows much less necessary:

To instantly move to the NEXT saved chart in your ChartList, hold down the CTRL key and press the "." (period) key.  Note that the period key also has the ">" character on it which is why we chose it for "NEXT".

To instantly move to the PREVIOUS saved chart, hold down the CTRL key and press the "," (comma) key.  Note that the comma key also has the "<" character on it - thus it is the "PREVIOUS" key.

Hopefully that will help power users speed through their saved charts even faster than before.

If you have any feedback for us about these changes - either positive or negative - please enter it below.  I won't be able to respond to it all, but it will get read and considered.

We will continue to improve and evolve the website over time.  We've been doing it for almost 12 years now and we have no plans on stopping.  We appreciate everyone's input into that process and everyone can look forward to lots of addition improvements in the coming weeks and months.

Enjoy!
- Chip

Public ChartLists v2.0 Update

Last month I wrote about our plans for the new version of our Public ChartLists area.  In that article I said we were shooting to release the new system around February 1st.  Well...  Turns out I was still giddy from the eggnog when I wrote that.  It's going to be a little while longer.

The good news is that we have made some great progress towards our goal.  I wanted to share a couple of screenshots of what things will look like once all the dust settles.

Remember, we have several goals we are trying to achieve with this new version including:

• A continual reward system with many levels - not just the single "Hall of Fame" designation.
• An easy-to-use categorization system that helps users find content they want to read quickly.
• An iron-clad voting system that will eliminate voting fraud.
• A list ranking system that is based on more than just simple voting.
• A notification system that lets readers know when content they are interested in has been updated.

With those ideas in mind, here's a screenshot of the new "scoreboard" page - the page that shows all the different Public ChartLists that people can choose from:

Let me point out some features that this screenshot hints at:

• Readers can search for ChartLists based on category or key word searches.  Each list can belong to up to 3 different categories such as "Cycle Analysis", "ETFs", or "None of the Above".
• Members can choose to "follow" (i.e., subscribe to) any ChartLists that they enjoy.  A gold star appears by lists that a member is following and the member can choose to be notified whenever any of his followed lists are updated.
• Members can vote on a daily basis for the lists (up to 3) that they enjoyed reading the most.
• Non-member can read any ChartList but they cannot follow any lists nor can they vote for any lists.
• Each day, we're going to use a combination of followers, votes, visits from non-members, and random reader survey results to calculate each list's "Quality Rank."  That rank will be used to determine a list's position on this "scoreboard" page.  The exact formula for determining that rank will not be released.  Our goal is to reward authors that focus on sharing great content rather than rewarding authors that try to game the ranking system.
• Readers can choose to re-sort the list by number of followers, number of votes, categories, or latest update time.
• Authors with consistantly high Quality Ranks will earn "perks" like having an icon/avatar for their list, having decorative text in their list description, having live links to other websites, having a different color theme for their list pages, having a personalized URL for their list, and more.  The complete list of "perks" and the requirements that need to be met in order to gain and keep each perk are still being worked out.
• Authors will also be able to earn "badges" for their list that help readers decide which lists to review.  Badges will be awarded for a variety of achievements including longevity, cumulative followers, cumulative votes, and more.  (Note: Current Hall-of-Fame mebers will get a special badge to commemorate that achievement.)
• Each day, the five highest ranked ChartLists will be featured on the scoreboard page.  We are considering ways to feature new authors as well. 

Here's a sample screenshot of what a ChartList with many of the perks could look like:

Again, parts of this are still evolving and there are several options that aren't shown, but here are some of the general things to notice:

• A color theme (one of 10+ that we will have) has been choosen.
• The StockCharts header has been minimized.
• The author's web page and Twitter accounts are linked in.
• The author's personalized avatar appears.
• There is lots of (unused) space for commentary about the list at the top of the page.
• There are prominent buttons for StockCharts members to vote for the list and/or subscribe to it.
• The badges that the author has earned appear prominently.
• An optional mechanism for readers to send feedback to the author will also be available.

If you are a reader of Public ChartLists, I hope these screenshots have you excited about the improved ability to find high-quality, interesting chart commentary to read.

If you are a Public ChartList author, hopefully you are excited about the ability to improve your list, earn rewards, and over time to essentially create your own financial commentary website using our live charts.  (Just imagine "http://stockcharts.com/list/your-name-here".)

We're hard at work right now making this stuff a reality.  I'll go out on another limb and say that it will be ready by March 1st.  I might be wrong again but hey, it will keep the programmers motivated...

- Chip