For the new year we have a number of enhancements planned including several new security types such as CEF’s, REIT’s and more. We hope to begin rolling these out next week but have several tweaks to make to the basic site before adding new pages, screens, and features. Your input on these is important.

While these proposed changes will affect how new screens are entered in the future, all existing screens will be translated for you. After many hours of tracking errors and working to better understand our users we have decided to make the following changes, unless you convince us otherwise:

1. Dollar volume and share volume have always been screened in units of 1,000. For example, to screen for volume > 1 million shares required an entry like [Volume] > 1000. This has obviously been confusing to new users, and we feel this should be clarified. We are proposing to change the units to 1 where you enter the number as you intend it to be interpreted. We also plan to support commas in numbers as well as abbreviations for thousands, millions, and billions (k,m,b). Therefore, any of the following would be valid for the above filter:

[Volume] > 1,000,000
[Volume] > 1000000
[Volume] > 1m

This proposed change would relate to $-volume, volume, 5-day average volume, and 60-day average volume.

2.  Our [StDev] field is better referred to as volatility, so this will be changed to [Volaty] for all the various time periods currently supported.  Our definition of volatility is standard deviation of the daily percent change in price.  What is generally referred to as standard deviation is calculated as the standard deviation of the price itself.  This change will clear an obstacle to adding a true standard deviation.

3.  We will be making a minor change to the RSf calculation for the inactively traded funds, that is those funds that are not regularly updated intra-day and which are excluded from the screener.  However, because RSf is a percentile rank across the population of funds, changing the way the low volume funds are calculated will have a small effect on the others.

The change we are making is to calculate RSf using just the actively traded funds and then interpolate between those values to derive a value for the low activity funds.  What we have noticed is that RSf values change between the last intra-day update and the end-of-day update, not just because of price change, but also because of the population make-up.  This eliminates such changes and should yield more consistent screen results.  We should note that none of this will affect in any way the sequencing of the RSf values, just the absolute values.  Therefore, sort orders based on RSf will not change.

We would be interested to hear your input on these proposed changes and invite you to suggest other changes that will make the site more straight-forward.

As this week progresses you may notice minor changes to text and a few page address changes to pave the way for the new security types.  Also, in the next day or two we plan to flag those screens that will require a translation due to the proposed changes.  You will have the opportunity to review the translations before they go live so that issues can be managed in a timely fashion.

Thank you, and your support of the ETFScreen.com site is much appreciated.