Re: [MAS-discuss] Re: [MAS: trading discussions] Bull Market?

[Jim C. <jt...@di...>]

Hi David.  Sorry for the late reply; I've been quite busy.

> On 2003-06-06, Jim Cochrane wrote to eiffel-mas-trading:
> Subject: Bull Market?
> >
> > I noticed today that my uptrend list now has 35 stocks in it.  (I use
> > weekly criteria in MAS to automatically update the list each day.)
> > Yesterday I believe it had around 25 or so and right around 20 the day
> > before.  My downtrend list had 1 stock in it yesterday; today it has 0.
> > Not sure whether this is indicative of things to come.
> 
> Jim, am i missing something in the docs? I cannot understand
> how to "automatically update a list". Is it that you have a
> certain registrant that is interested only in "trend" events and
> you parse the email to maintain a list. I noticed that you once
> said a similar thing about a list of overbought/oversold.

You guessed it - The maintaining of these lists takes place outside of
mas proper.  I have a cron job set up on my Linux system to first grab
the latest EOD data and insert it into the database; then mas is run with
this up-to-date data.  (The following is somewhat inaccurate, but close
to reality, for the purpose of brevity.)  A series of analyses is run
with the mas server, which is configurable and is currently configured as
follows: A long-term trend analysis is run with criteria to send "buy"
(uptrend) or "sell" (downtrend) signals based on weekly data to the
"mailer" program (which in this case is a script that parses the signals
and updates a downtrend, uptrend, and sidelined list accordingly).  Then a
short-term trend analysis is run on the tradables in the downtrend list,
looking for good short-sell signals; then a short-term analysis is run
on the uptrend list looking for buy signals.  These short-term signals
are sent by actual mail (e.g., the mailer is elm) to the user for him
to look over and decide if each signal is worth acting on.  The sidelined
list is ignored because (with the system I was using when I was actually
trading) I considered non-trending stocks as more difficult to trade and
thus not worth the risk.

I have considered moving this functionality into mas proper, but it
would be a good chunk of work.  Do you think you (or others listening in)
would be interested in such a feature?


Jim