Review of StockWrap Express Charts (Beta)

Last week someone wrote me an email to tell be about a free charting package at StockWrap.com. They were so enthusiastic about it that I actually assumed it was spam, and I wrote them an aggravated reply about how you don’t have to pretend you aren’t affiliated with a product to get me to try it. Well, it turns out this was an actual stranger that actually just felt compelled to write me out of the blue to praise the product. Sorry about that! You’d be surprised how many dishonest requests I get, though… :-)

Installation

Anyway, I had to wonder if the enthusiasm was warranted, so I downloaded the product. It took a couple days for me to get around to it because it’s Windows-only, and I spend most of my time on Macs. It was a mild annoyance that I had to download the dotNet framework to make it run. The needed version comes with Windows Vista, so that annoyance will diminish over time. They provide links to Microsoft’s download page, which was nice of them.

With the dotNet install out of the way, I downloaded their SWEC product. They warn you that you might need WinZip to extract their .zip archive, but I found the winXP compressed folder facility worked fine for me. It installed with no problems.

First Impression

So, I start the program, and it refused to do anything until I obtain a license file. That annoyed me. This is a free program. I don’t get it. I can only assume they harvested my email address and sold it to untold hordes of spammers. Good thing I gave them a temporary email address. But, once I got my license file, it activated painlessly and I could get started.

Charting

It’s a charting package for daily data, which you can roll up to Weekly, Monthly, Yearly as you might expect. It has a large array of tools you can use to draw on charts (such as the “Spiral of Archimedes” which I proudly put in the chart above). It does a good job of maintaining the locations of lines you’ve drawn when you switch time-frames.

The number of indicators available is wider than the set available via my broker’s platform, which is nice. The charts look clean. The interface for some things wasn’t immediately obvious. Like, double-clicking on an indicator adds it below the chart, even if it’s something like Bollinger Bands. To get the indicator overlaid, drag the name of the indicator onto the chart area. Fair enough…

Multiple charts open up in a tabbed interface, which I like. If there is a way to make additional charts open with some predifined set of indicators already applied, it wasn’t immediately obvious to me. But, I bet there is a way, or will be soon.

They claim on their website that it’s beta software, but the version number is 1.0.4, so that confuses me. Playing with it for 30 minutes, I only noticed one bug, which was pretty minor. Say you change parameters for an RSI from 14days to 5days. It still displays in the list of applied tools as RSI(14). If you have 3 different RSI’s applied, it looks confusing. I’m sure that will be fixed soon.

Scanning

I only played with this for a minute… long enough to see that the scanner is not customizable enough for my tastes. It appears you select a set of stocks, and chose among a preset list of things to scan for. Then you run the scan. I didn’t immediately see a way to scan the whole NYSE and Nasdaq, which is no surprise because it has to download the OHLC data for each stock you add, as you add it. I think this part of the product needs to get more mature, and maybe do server-side processing so that entire markets can be scanned.

… and much much more

There are supposedly a number of portfolio tracking features, but I have no interest in them and didn’t try to find them.

Summary

The charting part seems nice, and you can’t beat the free price tag. It would be nice if there were a way to get (delayed, of course, due to the free nature) intraday data. With that, I could see using this product to investigate stocks after the markets close, since the number of indicators and drawing capabilities is large. With only daily data available, this could still be quite useful for swing traders and longer-term investors. In fact, with the portfolio management stuff in the product, I think that’s the market they are aiming for.