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December 1996 Reviews This Month
By Joel T. Patz
SuperCharts 4 is not for the casual investments trader. Designed for technical traders who apply historical mathematical models to current trading data, the program offers a wide variety of plotting and reporting power, combined with new multimedia analysis features.
With version 4, you can plot historical fundamentals (information on earnings per share, dividend payout and stock splits, and so on) in a chart. The CD-ROM includes more than 25 years of price and fundamental data for more than 18,000 U.S. stocks, mutual funds and market indexes.
SuperCharts has always excelled at charting trends and technical indicators (more than 85 indicators are now built in). Version 4 identifies nine of the most important Candlestick Patterns, including Morningstar, Dark Cloud, Doji, and Bearish and Bullish Engulfing patterns. You can also create and save up to 1,000 of your own indicators.
A second product, SuperCharts Real Time, uses real-time data providers, so it's possible to create alerts to reflect trends based on trading volume rather than time. You can set the program to display real-time data at 1-, 5-, 10-, 15-, 30- or 60-minute intervals.
This update includes two new Expert Analysts Indicators. Thomas DeMark focuses on finding strategic tops and bottoms in the market, in hopes of predicting changes in price direction trends. When you use an analyst's technique on your chosen security, the program displays a window of expert commentary in text form and a video clip of the expert giving his analysis.
If you're using a real-time feed, you can display headlines or full news stories on screen. The NewsMonitor alerts you when you receive headlines or stories matching your customized criteria. End-of-day traders can import daily data in any of eight third-party formats, including CompuTrac, AIQ, MetaStock and TeleChart 2000.
Besides graphing the daily high/low/close data, you can create ShowMe and PaintBar studies to automatically analyze a chart for user-specified market conditions, then color or graphically highlight bars.
The only drawback to this excellent charting and analysis product is its complex and poorly organized documentation manuals.
--Info File--
SuperCharts 4 and SuperCharts Real Time
Price: SuperCharts, $295 (direct only), without multimedia,
$199 (retail only); Real Time, $69.50 for 12 months (direct only)
Pros: Technical analysis
Cons: Disorganized documentation
Disk: Space: 50MB
RAM: 8MB minimum (16MB recommended)
Platforms: 3x, 95, NT
Omega Research
800-422-8587, 305-270-1095
WinMag Box Score 4.0
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