Hi Everyone,

In the past I have used ESignal's Advanced Charts to export large amounts (6 months of 1-minute bars) of historical, intraday data for many symbols. Included with the data is the values of many technical indicators that I have chosen (for example, the 9-minute RSI, 34-minute ROC, etc.).

I am considering moving to MetaStock Pro because I would like to use MetaStock Explorer to scan the market roughly once every minute for securities that score higher than a certain amount. The score is a custom computation that relies on the same type of the technical indicators that I previously downloaded (i.e. the custom computation will use the 9-minute RSI plus other indicators).

I would like to know:
(1) Can I download such historical data using MetaStock/QuoteCenter (including custom technical indicators) and

(2) can MetaStock Explorer rescan the market (or a fixed set of symbols - like 1000) every minute?

I could still use ESignal to download the data, but I am not sure that MetaStock Explorer will compute the technical indicators the exact same way that ESignal Advanced Charts computes them. (I know that most technical indicators follow "standard" formulas, but you'd be surprised how much those computations vary from vendor to vendor). If Explorer computes indicators in a different way than ESignal, then my custom computation won't work correctly and the Explorer scan will be incorrect. That's why I want to make sure that Explorer uses the _exact_ same formulas that were used to compute the historical indicators.

Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to make sure I explained my problem clearly.

Thanks in advance,
John

The Explorer cannot auto-scan, although I suppose with a savvy enough macro'ing application it might be possible to try and set this up.  That said, intraday scans are possible but can be slow to complete.  The Explorer does have a fairly sensitive timeout period before moving on to the next symbol.  If it takes too long to collect the intraday history needed to start the scan, it will give up and move on to the next security.

You can mitigate this somewhat by using "Load Minimum Records" in the Explorer-->Options, but for many exponential calculations you will want to make sure and load as much history into the explorer as you load into your charts, and "Load Minimum Records" may not be possible for your formulas (especially indicators that use exponential calculations, like RSI).

The number of securities you decide to scan (with Data on Demand) will also determine the success.  Using Local Intraday Data would work significantly better for the Explorer, but Local Intraday Securities can be very difficult to maintain.  Realistically you would not be able to collect/updating 1000 local intraday securities.  Most data providers have a symbol limit for the amount of securities you can be updating at one time.

This would basically leave you with Data On Demand as the only realistic option, and scanning 1,000 securities on-demand every minute would likely not be possible (it would likely not even be close to completing a scan of 1,000 symbols every minute on demand).

I suppose the short answer is no, trying to scan 1,000 intraday securities every minute is simply not going to be feasible at this time.

Thanks, Justin. I spoke with a MetaStock rep at length about this issue and got pretty much the same answer. :(