Monday, December 8, 1997

A New Window For Traders

Day Trader offers a variety of functions, competition for TradeStation

Reviewed By Theresa W. Carey

Window on WallStreet is one of the leading publishers of software programs for investors. Its Professional Investor program, version 5.0 (Barron's, October 28, 1996), is among the best packages for serious investors who have an interest in technical analysis.

Now Window on WallStreet Day Trader, introduced in September, takes Professional Investor to its absolute limits. Day Trader includes Window on WallStreet's (WOW's) real-time news feeds and stock-symbol updates, along with its usual charting and stock-screening tools -- plus a lot more for day traders.

Day Trader offers a wide range of technical and fundamental indicators, with many ways to combine them and create your own indicators and trading systems. As with WOW Professional Investor, Day Trader includes 17 trading systems, as well as the ability to build and back-test your own, and then rank its performance. The charting functions are enhanced to include intraday views that can show last-tick, minute-by-minute and end-of-day charts. At a list price of $1,295 plus monthly data-acquisition charges of $150 and up for a real-time satellite feed, Day Trader exceeds our usual $1,000 limit for software packages, although subscribers to DTN's satellite data feed can get the program for $895. (WOW offers Day Trader through a $99.95-a-month subscription as well.)

But since there are few enough good packages to serve day traders' needs and even fewer that cost less than $1,000, we suspended our usual rules and decided to evaluate it here. Overall, Day Trader is a powerful program that adds a formidable set of tools to the day trader's arsenal. Because we did have some technical problems using it on our PC (which we'll discuss later), we rate it ** 1/2. Had it not required such a large amount of memory to handle all the data, it would have gotten a higher rating.

Day Trader ships on two CD-ROMs, one containing the program and the other holding historical price, volume and fundamental data. The program itself runs in two segments: the Market Data Server, which must be started first to collect real-time data, and the Day Trader processing and analysis tools. WOW recommends that you let the Market Data Server work for 24 hours before starting to use Day Trader, to make sure there are data in the system to analyze -- then leave the server running around the clock. (Getting Day Trader running involves one additional step: You must phone Window on WallStreet and get an authorization code. They can be reached only during business hours in the Central time zone.)

When you install the program, you're encouraged to get any program updates that might have been introduced since the CD was issued; an Internet connection that's already installed and running on your computer is a key component of this step. Day Trader reminds you to get program updates from Window on WallStreet's Web site once a month, and those updates are then automatically installed.

One of Window on WallStreet's shortcomings in the past was its insistence on using just two or three data vendors. Now, besides DTN, WOW Day Trader also supports Bonneville, Signal (from Data Broadcasting Corp.), S&P Comstock and PC Quote as sources of real-time quotes. While the Market Data Server is running, the data-feed service provides price and volume information for each equity traded, as well as news. WOW stores that information on your computer's hard disk, then lets you access it from the Day Trader program. Symbols are automatically updated as they're received over the data feed, and 250 exchanges are represented. (Note that each exchange to which you subscribe requires you to fill out a form and pay a fee, so data collection costs are not insignificant. The data providers collect the exchange fees, which start at $11.50 a month for the New York and American stock exchanges and for Nasdaq, in addition to your subscription cost.)

You may also want to update WOW's end-of-day price/volume data and fundamental data through providers such as Dial Data, Dow Jones or CompuServe. Day Trader's Personal Investment Assistant (PIA), designed to automate end-of-day downloads and bulk analyses, can push the busywork into the middle of the night.

Once the data updates are in place, it's time to get Day Trader's analytical engine running. SmartScan, one of my favorite features from past versions of Window on WallStreet, has been enhanced so that it works with real-time data as well as end-of-day data. (SmartScan searches through piles of data for buy and sell signals, and alerts you to them in a concise report.) You can set up a template to be used for the group of symbols you select, and have SmartScan work through them.

Past versions of WOW were weak in areas of options and futures analysis, and not much has been added to Day Trader in these areas. You can display a full option chain from the underlying symbol, and then load those symbols and prices into a Quote List Window, but that's the extent of it. The manual's index, which is sparsely populated, doesn't separate program options from options trading. There are several ways to tour the program, though, so that you don't have to depend on the thin manual. WOW includes a multimedia overview of trading strategies featuring Day Trader, as well as a walk through the program. As a bonus, Jonathan Pond's financial-planning program is included on the CD-ROM, and is accessible from the HELP menu.

Now, for the technical problems. With all the data, the program is a storage and memory hog: Day Trader requires almost 90MB of hard-drive space to install, plus an additional 400MB or so -- possibly more -- to process the daily data. It also requires the 32-bit operating-system capability of Windows 95 or Windows NT, plus a high-horsepower Pentium processor (100 MHz or faster).

Most important, you'll need a lot of RAM (random access memory) to run the program reliably -- a minimum of 64MB, available now on only the more advanced PCs. Our test system, a more typical 200 MHz Pentium with 32MB RAM, crashed several times while analyzing large data sets, those with more than 40 stocks-not a big group for day traders. We had no problem for groups of 20 or less. (Though most computer systems sold in the past two years can theoretically handle up to 128MB, upgrading can be a problem for people who don't know the computer well.)

Day Trader is designed to compete directly with Dow Jones/Omega Research's TradeStation, which was just upgraded as we go to press. (The new version of TradeStation runs only under Windows NT, however.) TradeStation includes some programming capability, called EasyLanguage, which Window on WallStreet lacks. However, a WOW spokesman says Day Trader will be able to read EasyLanguage code in a coming update, and will have its own programming language. TradeStation is currently priced at $2,495 or $199.95 a month -- about double the cost of Day Trader.

Having two strong programs competing for the day trader's computer is a good thing. Both will have to improve and add value to stay in the game-just as Window on WallStreet has done in rolling out Day Trader.

Send Comments on the Electronic Investor to hgold@online.barrons.com

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