smtmp - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

smtm - Display and update a configurable ticker of global stock quotes

SYNOPSYS

smtm [options] [stock_symbol ...]

OPTIONS

--time min minutes to wait before update
--file smtmrc to store/retrieve stocks selected
--proxy pr network address and port of firewall proxy
--fwall [id:pw] account and password for firewall
--chart len select length of data interval shown in chart
(must be one of b, w, 3, 6, 1, 2, 5, m or t)
--timeout len timeout in seconds for libwww-perl UserAgent
--wide also display value changes and holdings
--percent show relative performance in percent instead of bps
--sort style sort display by specified style
(must be one r, a, p, v, n, v, V or h)
--columns set choose the columns to display (can be any combination
of s, n, l, a, r, v, p, V, R, h)
--nookbutton close other windows via left mouseclick, suppress button
--help print a short help message

DESCRIPTION

smtm, which is a not overly clever acronym for Show Me The Money, is a financial ticker
and portfolio application for quotes from exchanges around the world (provided they are
carried on Yahoo!). It creates and automatically updates a window with quotes from Yahoo!
Finance. It can also display the entire variety of charts available at Yahoo! Finance.
When called with one or several symbols, it displays these selected stocks. When smtm is
called without arguments, it reads the symbols tickers from a file, by default ~/.smtmrc.
This file can be created explicitly by calling the Save option from the File menu. Beyond
stocks, smtm can also display currencies (from the Philadephia exchange), US mutual funds,
options on US stocks, several precious metals and quite possibly more; see the Yahoo!
Finance website for full information.

smtm can also aggregate the change in value for both individual positions and the the
entire portfolio. For this, the number of shares is needed, as well as the cross-currency
expression pair. The standard ISO notation is used. As an example, GBPUSD translates from
Pounds into US Dollars. To compute annualised returns, the purchase date and purchase
price can also be entered.

smtm displays the full name of the company, the absolute price change and the relative
percentage change in basispoints (i.e., hundreds of a percent) or in percentages if the
corresponding option has been selected. Other information that can be displayed are the
traded volume, the profit/loss, the aggregate positon value, the holding period length,
the annualised return, the drawdown, the earnings per share, the price/earnings ratio, the
dividend yield, and the market capitalization. Note that the return calculation ignores
such fine points as dividends, and foreign exchange appreciation or depreciation for
foreigns stocks. All display columns can be selected, or deselected, individually.

Losers are flagged in red. smtm can be used for stocks from the USA, Canada, various
European exchanges, various Asian exchanges (Singapore, Taiwan, HongKong, Kuala Lumpur,
...) Australia and New Zealand. It should work for other markets supported by Yahoo. US
mutual funds are also available, but less relevant as their net asset value is only
computed after the market close. Some fields might be empty if Yahoo! does not supply the
full set of fields; the number of supported fields varies even among US exchanges. The
sorting order can be chosen among eight different options.

The quotes and charts are delayed, typically 15 minutes for NASDAQ and 20 minutes
otherwise, see http://finance.yahoo.com for details. New Zealand is rumoured to be
somewhat slower with a delay of one hour. However, it is worth pointing out that (at least
some) US) indices are updated in real time at Yahoo!, and therefore available in real time
to smtm. Intra-day and five-day charts are updated during market hours by Yahoo!, other
charts with longer timeframes are updated only once a week by Yahoo!.

smtm supports both simple proxy firewalls (via the --proxy option) and full-blown
firewalls with account and password authorization (via the --fwall option). Firewall
account name and password can be specified as command line arguments after --fwall, or
else in a pop-up window. This setup has been in a few different environments.

smtm can display two more views of a share position. Clicking mouse button 1 launches a
detailed view with price, date, change, volume, bid, ask, high, low, year range,
price/earnings, dividend, dividend yield, market capital information, number of shares
held and annualised return. However, not all of that information is available at all
exchanges. Clicking the right mouse button display a chart of the corresponding stock;
this only works for US and Canadian stocks. The type of chart can be specified either on
the command-line, or via the Chart menu. Choices are intraday, five day, three months, six
months, one year, two years, five years or max years. The default chart is a five day
chart. The middle mouse button opens an edit window to modify and augment the information
stored per stock.

See http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/fin/chart/ for help on Yahoo! Finance charts.

smtm has been written and tested under Linux. It should run under any standard Unix,
success with Solaris, HP-UX and FreeBSD is confirmed (but problems are reported under
Solaris when a threaded version of Perl is used). It also runs under that other OS from
Seattle using the ActivePerl implementation from http://www.activestate.com. In either
case, it requires the Perl/Tk module for windowing, and the LWP module (also known as
libwww-perl) for data retrieval over the web. The excellent Date::Manip modules is also
required for the date parsing and calculations. With recent versions of ActivePerl, only
Date::Manip needs to be installed on top of the already provided modules.

EXAMPLES

smtm CSCO NT

creates a window following the Cisco and Nortel stocks.

smtm MSFT:Bill SUNW:Scott ORCL:Larry

follows three other tech companies and uses the override feature for the displayed name. [
Historical note: We once needed that for European stocks as Yahoo! did not supply the
company name way back in 1999 or so. This example just documents a now ancient feature. ]

smtm BT.A.L::10:GBPCAD T::10:USDCAD \
BCE.TO::10 13330.PA::10:EURCAD \
"555750.F:DT TELECOM:10:EURCAD"

creates a window with prices for a handful of telecom companies on stock exchanges in
London, New York, Toronto, Paris and Frankfurt. Note how a names is specified to override
the verbose default for the German telco. Also determined are the number of shares, here
10 for each of the companies. Lastly, this example assumes a Canadian perspective: returns
are converted from British pounds, US dollars and Euros into Canadian dollars. Quotation
marks have to be used to prevent the shell from splitting the argument containing spaces.
[ Historical note: The Deutsche Telecom stock can now also be referenced as DTEGn.DE;
similarly other stock previously available only under their share number are now
accessible using an acronym reflecting their company name.]

MENUS

Four menus are supported: File, Edit, Chart and Help. The File menu offers to load or
save to the default file, or to 'save as' a new file. Exit is also available.

The Edit menu can launch windows to either add a new stock or delete one or several from a
list box. Submenus for column selection based on various criteria are available.
Similarly, the Sort menu allows to select one of eight different sort options. Further,
one can modify the delay time between updates and choose between the default title display
or the wide display with changes in the position and total position value.

The Charts menu allows to select the default chart among the eight choices intraday, five
day, three months, six months, one year, two years, five years or 'max' years. Chart sizes
can be selected among three choices. Plot types can be selected among line chart, bar
chart and the so-called candlestick display. For both moving averages and exponential
moving averages, six choices are avilable (5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 200 days, respectively)
which can all be selected (or deselected) individually. Similarly, any one of seven
popular technical analysis charts can be added. Logarithmic scale can be turned on/off.
Volume bar charts as also be selected or deselected. Similarly, Bollinger bands and the
parabolic SAR can be selected. A selection box can be loaded to enter another symbol (or
several of these, separated by comma) for performance comparison. Lastly, the gallery
command can launch the display of a chart for each and every stock symbol currenly loaded
in the smtm display. Note that intra-day and intra-week charts do not offer all the
various charting options longer-dated charts have available. Once charts are shown, they
are also updated regularly at the same interval the main displayed is updated at.

Lastly, the Help menu can display either the text from the manual page, or the copyright
information in a new window.

DISPLAY

The main window is very straightforward. For each of the stocks, up to eleven items can be
displayed: its symbol, its name, its most recent price, the change from the previous close
in absolute terms, the change in relative terms, the volume, the profit or loss, the total
position value, the holding period, the annualised return (bar F/X effects or dividends)
and the drawdown relative to the 52-week high. The relative change is either expressed in
basispoints (bps), which are 1/100s of a percent, or in percent; this can be controlled
via a checkbutton as well as an command-line option. Further display options are earnings
per share, price/earnings ratio, dividend yield and market capitalization. This display
window is updated in regular intervals; the update interval can be specified via a menu or
a command-line option.

The window title displays the relative portfolio profit or loss for the current day in
basispoints, i.e., hundreds of a percent, or in percent if the corresponding option is
chosen, as well as the date of the most recent update. If the --wide options is used, the
net change and ney value of the portfolio (both in local currency) are also displayed.

Clicking on any of the stocks with the left mouse button opens a new window with all
available details for a stock. Unfortunately, the amount of available information varies.
Non-North American stocks only have a limited subset of information made available via the
csv interface of Yahoo!. For North American stocks, not all fields all provided by all
exchanges. Clicking on the details display window itself closes this window. Clicking on
any of the stocks with the right mouse button opens a new window with a chart of the given
stock in the default chart format. This option was initially available only for North
American stocks but now works across most if not all markets, thanks to expanded support
by Yahoo!. Clicking on the chart window itself closes this window. Finally, the middle
mouse button opens an edit window.

CHART DISPLAY (AKA 'GALLERY' MODE)

In 'gallery' mode, chart windows are opened for all active securities. These charts are
automatically updated whenever the display is updated. This mean that only the intra-
daily and intra-weekly chart timeframe selection are meaningful -- all others are updated
at the source, i.e. Yahoo!, daily or weekly, and there is no little point in downloading
the same chart over and over again.

However, for intra-daily and intra-weekly charts, this is a very useful feature. It should
be noted that not all chart size, chart timeframe and chart option permutations actually
lead to existing charts. For example, logarithmic scale does seem to exist for shorter-
dated time frames. Neither does the 'small' chart size.

Use smtmp online using onworks.net services