TUTORIAL GUIDE PART 2: FILE MAINTENANCE SM3.02 PAGE 1 OF 11 This tutorial assumes you have already installed the Stock Charting System on your hard disk, or have made working copy diskettes to use. It also assumes you are familiar with Part 1, which takes you through a step-by-step procedure to acquaint you with some of its features. In Part 2, we will perform "file maintenance" - the process of adding, deleting and changing data in a file. A "file" is a contiguous set of homogeneous data, such as the catalog (list of securities) or a price history (stock chart). It is also a named unit of data storage on disk, for example the catalog file which has the name CATALOG.POR. See Appen- dix B for a glossary of computer terminology. Whenever the program asks you to enter information such as the name of a security or a current price, the data is typed into a solid video block near the bottom of the screen. It is not necessary to fill that block. Lowercase letters are automatically changed to uppercase (CAPITAL) let- ters. The backspace key (not the smaller left-arrow key) can be used to make corrections. TUTORIAL GUIDE PART 2: FILE MAINTENANCE PAGE 2 OF 11 1. Let's start by adding a new security to the list. From the Master Menu, type S to go to the Stock Select screen. You should see the list of securities with another menu at the bottom. Note this screen actually has a dual purpose - to select a security to graph, or to add, delete or change information pertaining to securities. 2. Type A to ADD a new security to the list. You will see a list of security types at the bottom of the screen. Use the left-arrow or right-arrow key to move the selector bar over the type of security you want. For a description of the available security types, press H for HELP or see Chapter 12. For now select COMMON STOCK, then press the Enter key to register your selection to the program. 3. Enter the ticker symbol. If there is no official ticker symbol, you must make one up, for example DJIND for Dow Jones Industrials. If you plan to "import" volume and prices from an external file, you must use the same ticker symbols as the source of your data. You can find ticker symbols in Barron's, The Wall Street Journal, Standard & Poor's Stock Guide or Value Line Investment Survey. Or, ask your broker. For this demonstration, type TEST . TUTORIAL GUIDE PART 2: FILE MAINTENANCE PAGE 3 OF 11 4. Next, enter the security name. If you plan to enter current volume and prices from a newspaper, use a spelling similar to what is in that paper, including any blank spaces. For example, use S C E CORP instead of SCECORP. Blank spaces sort lower than any other charac- ters; therefore S C E CORP will come before SAN DIEGO GAS in the Current Data Update screen. You may have to re-arrange certain names, for example BLOCK, H R instead of H&R BLOCK, or LILLY, ELI instead of ELI LILLY. The security name can always be changed at a later time. In the Current Data Update screen (discussed later in this chapter), securities are arranged by type, exchange and name (to facilitate entry of data from a newspaper). In the Stock Select screen, securities are always arranged in order by type and symbol. 5. The next item is the exchange. Enter a 2-letter code such as NY for New York or OC for Over-the-Counter. TUTORIAL GUIDE PART 2: FILE MAINTENANCE PAGE 4 OF 11 6. The program will then ask for a category. This is for a stock or fund category such as UTILITIES or TECHNOLGY or GROWTH. Entry of this data item is optional, and is retained for compatibility with companion portfolio management features not included in this version of the Stock Charting System. 7. You can have a DAILY-updated stock chart, or a WEEKLY-updated stock chart, or both. When you add a security to the system, the program will ask how many days and/or weeks of volume/price data you want to keep. The number you enter tells the computer how much disk space to set aside for this stock. If you enter 0 (zero), no space is set aside. 7a. For this example, enter 0 (zero) for the number of days and 52 (or any number you want, from 31 to 319) for the number of weeks. 7b. All other data items are optional, and are discussed in Chapter 11. Any data item can be entered or corrected later. Press Esc to ter- minate data entry. The program will ask if you want to keep the data - reply Y for YES. TUTORIAL GUIDE PART 2: FILE MAINTENANCE PAGE 5 OF 11 8. Now you should be back in the Stock Select screen with the selector bar on the security you just added. Let's change one of the data items. Type C and this will take you to the View Screen for Indi- vidual Securities (the same screen used before while adding a new security). 8a. Use the left- or right-arrow key to select the security name. Press C to change it; then try a slightly different spelling. Using this method you can change any data item. If you change a ticker symbol, its corresponding price history file(s) will automatically be re- named. 8b. Press H (for HELP) or see Chapter 11 for further explanation of each individual data item. Then press Esc to return back to the Stock Select screen. TUTORIAL GUIDE PART 2: FILE MAINTENANCE PAGE 6 OF 11 9. About 1/4 of the way up from the lower right corner of the screen you will see the word Daily or Weekly inside a solid block. Press the TAB key a couple of times and observe how that word alternates with each keypress. 9a. This tells the program whether you want to work with DAILY or WEEKLY historical data. Press the TAB key once more if necessary to see the word WEEKLY, as we will be working with weekly-updated data. 10. Press E and in a moment you should see the Historical Data Entry screen. The leftmost column consists of dates one week apart and falling on Fridays. The program computes all of these dates, and the latest one should be the Friday previous to today's date. WARNING: The computer obtains the system date from DOS to use as today's date. 10a. The main purpose of this screen is to "fill in" historical volume and price data for a security that has just been added to the sys- tem. This process is optional. TUTORIAL GUIDE PART 2: FILE MAINTENANCE PAGE 7 OF 11 11. Try out the up-arrow, down-arrow, PgUp, PgDn, Home and End keys. They are used to select a particular date for the purpose of entering or correcting volume and price data. Press End to put the selector bar on the latest date at the bottom of the screen. 12. Press E and enter the volume and high, low and closing prices. For now you can make them up, for example 1411 50 46.5 49 1/2 . Note the program will accept fractional entries. Move the selector bar up one line, press E and enter an- other set of values. Enter three or four contiguous sets of values; this will give you a more presentable graph later on. For a mutual fund you can press E, press the Enter key twice, and then just enter the NAV (net asset value). For example type E 8.245. 13. Press U and observe that a new contiguous date value gets added to the bottom of the display. You can enter another set of values, or press the Esc key to cancel. Note E is to enter or correct data for EXISTING dates; U adds a NEW date after the last date on the screen. TUTORIAL GUIDE PART 2: FILE MAINTENANCE PAGE 8 OF 11 13a. See Chapter 16 for information on how to process stock splits and mutual fund distributions and how to set the moving average periods. We will be examining the Graphics capabilities of the program in Part 3 of the Tutorial. Press the Esc key to return to the Stock Select screen. Press Esc once more to return to the Master Menu. 14. One more basic file maintenance step remains: updating current vol- ume and prices. From the Master Menu press W. This will take you to the Current Data Update screen, for securities that are updated WEEKLY. (If you press D, you will be updating daily information). This display is used to update ALL weekly-updated securities with CURRENT volume and prices, all at once on the same screen. This is opposed to the U function from the Historical Data Entry screen, which updates only ONE security. Normally - except for filling in price history for a just-added sec- urity - this screen is what you will be using for daily or weekly updating of volume and prices. TUTORIAL GUIDE PART 2: FILE MAINTENANCE PAGE 9 OF 11 NOTE: In the Current Data Update screen, securities are arranged in order by security type, exchange and name to permit easier updating of current volume and prices from a newspaper. You as the user can control the arrangement by varying the spelling of security names and exchanges. For example if you obtain current quotes from Barron's, you can use NY for the New York exchange and OC for over-the-counter. However if you want American exchange stocks to come in between NY and OC, as they do in Barron's, you will have to use something like OA for those. 15. Let's update current volume and prices manually. Use the up-arrow and down-arrow keys to select the security where you want to start entering quotes. Then press E. The computer will ask for that volume and high, low, close and previous prices. Entry of the pre- vious price is optional; if you don't know it press Enter by itself. Each time you finish data entry on one line, the selector bar will automatically move down to the next line, and so on until the end of the list is reached or you press the Esc key. Note the program calculates the percentage change from the previously entered quotes. TUTORIAL GUIDE PART 2: FILE MAINTENANCE PAGE 10 OF 11 15a. Entry of fractional values such as 2 11/16 is permitted; leave a space between the whole number and fraction so the computer knows, for example, you don't mean it to be 21 1/16 instead. To leave an existing value intact, press Enter by itself. 15b. For mutual funds, you can bypass entry of the volume and high and low prices by pressing the Enter key twice, then entering the NAV (Net Asset Value). Press Enter once again to bypass entry of the previous price. 16. At this point, the price history files have NOT actually been up- dated. To perform the actual update, press U. The program will ask for the date for which the just-entered data is current. Enter the date, or just press ENTER alone to use the current DOS system date. If the date you enter is later than any of the existing dates on the price history files (stock charts), new date(s) will be added as re- quired to bring each one up to date. At this point, press Enter to continue and the program will actually update each price history file individually. TUTORIAL GUIDE PART 2: FILE MAINTENANCE PAGE 11 OF 11 17. The process of "importing" current volume and prices from an exter- nal ASCII file is an advanced technique which will not be covered in this tutorial. You will need to know how to use an external commun- ications program such as ProComm Plus, how to save downloaded data on disk as an ASCII file, how that data is formatted, and how to manage files and sub-directories in DOS. For more information read Chapters 13 and 14 in the user manual. 17a. This completes Tutorial Part 2. Continue on to Part 3 to explore the different kinds of graphical analysis that are available.