We made a few tweaks to the site this afternoon, particularly the Alerts page and the Screener page.

We modified the Alerts code to include our EMA options along with the existing SMA’s, price, and RSf.  This was a request we received subsequent to one of our prior blog posts, so please don’t think we totally ignore you.  We may be slow at times, but we do listen.  While working on the Alerts pages we made a few other tweaks to improve feedback to the user.

For those that haven’t used the Alerts feature, it allows you to set price limits, price change limits, moving average crossovers, and RSf changes, and will send emails if there was an alert from the prior day’s trading.  It works off of your portfolios, and you can set up rules that apply to the entire portfolio and/or rules that apply to individual symbols.  Emails are limited to one per day per portfolio, and only when an alert is triggered.

The link to the Alerts page is from the navigation bar’s “My Pages” tab.  Obviously, you must be logged in.

The Screener code had several changes today, starting with improved error detection and, hopefully, more informative error messages that pinpoint the rule where the error occurred.  We will be monitoring the errors caught and the messages given but would appreciate hearing from you if you find a goof somewhere.

We also changed the “Edit Screen/Backtest” button by breaking it into two parts and adding some code to scroll the screen to the correct position.  We hope this will make it a more fluid process to run multiple backtest scenarios.  Additionally, we added a similar “Edit Screen” link to the top of the “Current Picks” table, so you no longer have to manually scroll to the bottom of 200 symbols just to click the edit button.

We were also advised of a problem with the Symbol List functionality that resulted in an error when symbols were separated by both a comma and a space.  That no longer generates an error.

There were a few other little “behind the scenes” changes made in preparation for rolling out two new functions in the next few days.  First out will be a Percentile Rank function that will rank any field on a 0 to 100 scale.  This will allow us to better control multiple screen inputs, like balancing risk versus return.  It will be possible, for example, to eliminate the most volatile 20% of funds and sort the remainder by some performance measure.  Or, but utilizing a User Defined Variable, one could sort a list of funds by a custom weighting factor that included both return and risk.  This should be a big benefit to our screen backtesting.

The other function allows us to pull a single value from the table and use it to compare other funds.  For example, we could set up a filter requiring past 3-month return to be greater than the past 3-month return of TLT or SHY.  We will probably find other uses, but the driving need was to identify some minimum performance level below which we would rather be in cash.  Just another tool to manage risk.

There will be another post as these new features are rolled out. We hope you find these changes beneficial.