This is a great description for Metastock I found in my files 6.5 is now an older version , A good thing to remember when looking at software is the fact that they all read yesterdays data ,
None can look ahead no matter how many formulars or indicators they have
************************
True techies will focus on the new analytical tools in MetaStock 6.5. One of the most convenient is the new comparative relative strength indicator (RSI). Here, you select the indicators, answer the program’s question about what is to be compared, and up pops a line showing the day-to-day ratio between the two securities. This eliminates the old habit of overlaying charts to see how things are going. Other goodies include MESA cycle studies, John Ehlers-style sine wave plotting, Marc Chaikin’s money flow, and Patrick Mulloy’s dual/triple exponential moving average (DEMA and TEMA). MESA is a nifty tool for finding definitive cyclical content in prices, although here it is implemented as a sine wave, wherein the crossings of the slow and the fast are trading signals. Chaikin’s money flow averages the values for an accumulation/distribution line, while Mulloy’s DEMA combines a single and a double exponential moving average to cut signal lag. You’ll also find E. Michael Poulos’s random walk index and the range indicator. The relative momentum index and the stochastic momentum index as well as J. Welles Wilder’s smoothing are included for the first time. Line studies have also been enhanced with the ODDS probability cone (the expected range of prices given a normal distribution of changes), a triangle (just point, click and drag), the standard error channel (standard errors about a linear regression line), and a standard deviation channel (standard deviations about a linear regression). I particularly like Wilder’s smoothing, although little is said about it in the descriptive material. If you’re a channel enthusiast, you’ll be very happy with the ease of drawing and ease of modifying linear channels. Technical analysts also love system testing, and MetaStock 6.5 boosts this capability somewhat with the ability to input a value when plotting a custom indicator (one you’ve built). A more obscure function is the ability to load an entire data array with the "last value" of another array - presumably the last price in another time series. Formula writers can now wax prolific with specs up to 2,500 characters over several lines. And you can now have variables in your formulas, something that wasn’t available heretofore. Plus, you can now plot more than one line per formula, allowing you to create your own multi-line studies. and filtering capability after the fact. You can write up to six conditions by a series of column specifications, but you have to put away your exploration to view the charts of the targets you find. The filtering capability uses just about everything in the formula language, so thinning the ranks of targets can be fairly thorough. Explorations don’t give you a list to be re-screened, yielding yet another list and so on; rather, you iteratively refine your initial setup until it gets just what you want to catch. The good news here is that you can save, edit and re-run well-tested Explorations so you don’t have to recreate them. The only other limitation is that they must be run manually. You can’t run them automatically overnight unless you use, say, Autorun for Windows. One user reported that this works fairly reliably. Internet Access
EQUIS continues to link more and more information from the Internet to your charts. Not only can you summon news over the Internet via Reuters from within a chart, but you can also summon the "option chain" available for your symbol. EQUIS’s own Web site, with its true Java charting, is also accessible and worth visiting. Once both MetaStock and your browser are up and running, you’ve got a very fast, flexible analytical capability limited only by screen space. A large screen or multiple monitors work best to exploit all the capability provided here. Going in another direction, MetaStock 6.5 allows you to save your charts as HTML documents, which is a nice convenience if you’re publishing electronically. Technical and Online Support Not on the Web site but in the help function is a thoroughly indexed and cross-indexed manual, which includes some formulas, parameters and brief interpretations of most of the indicators in MetaStock 6.5. I found the indexed help tremendously helpful but often wished for some elaboration. The heavily hypertexted online manual will easily get users to their information. Customer support continues to be as strong as it always has been, both by voice and E-mail. Within the program itself, help buttons are everywhere. EQUIS deserves praise too for its Web site, especially the charting application. The data is current through the last end-of-day, and the news feed will take you directly to Reuters’ headlines and full stories for the company in question. Another great feature is Technical Analysis From A to Z by EQUIS founder Steve Achelis. The entire book is available on the Web site, so you can find explanations of the indicators you run across, from the popular to the obscure. The book must not have been updated since MetaStock 6.5 was released, because the new indicators in 6.5 aren’t described in the book. Summary I like MetaStock because EQUIS International reliably adds to the package lots of the new indicators published in STOCKS & COMMODITIES (which I say without any bias!). In addition, the program fully exploits the operating system’s abilities to interface with other programs such as browsers and Microsoft Excel. Once data is loaded into the program, opening and adjusting charts is straightforward; novices to experts will quickly display exactly what they want. Saving layouts of charts can be a little tricky. The object-orientation programming is sophisticated and makes drag-and-drop convenience a reality. This is especially nifty when you want to plop a chart full of price and indicators into an Excel worksheet. Probing the data has been improved: Simply let your cursor hang around the price bars and a data window pops up to display the precise numbers. There is an option to automatically scale the chart to what’s being displayed on it, EQUIS has added manual scaling: You grab the axis number you want and drag it into position, producing an instant re-scaling. Analytically, EQUIS has given solid firepower
