Each month in this Journal, our technical support staff addresses issues of interest to many CSI subscribers in a question-and-answer format. 

Notice:
  The views and information expressed in this document reflect the opinions and experience of the author Robert C. Pelletier.  Neither CSI nor the author undertake or intend to provide tax advice or trading advice in any market or endorse any outside individual or firm.  All recommendations are provided for their informational value only.  Readers should consult competent financial advisors or outside counsel before making any software purchase or investment decision.  CSI does not stand behind or endorse the products of any outside firms.

Copyright (c) 2000 Commodity Systems Inc. (CSI).  All rights are reserved.

Q..
    I have read your articles about Unfair Advantage's Stock Scanner [now MarketScanner] with interest, but frankly, the ActivePerl programming code leaves me frustrated and confused. What are your plans for the average non-programmer who uses UA?

A.
    We have found that many, but certainly not all, of our customers are uncomfortable with the Perl language we selected for use with our Market Scanner (formerly Stock Scanner). The choice was based on Perl's flexibility and capability, not its inherent user friendliness or lack thereof. VisualBasic® is also free with Unfair Advantage for the Perl-adverse user. There are many examples in our sample code that make navigation easy.

    For now, MarketScanner has a growing following of traders who are also programmers. As time goes by, we plan to expand the sample library of pre-selected studies for use with MarketScanner, as well as add more studies for charting and analysis through UA that will require no programming skills. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for bearing with us as we attempt to serve our very diverse customer base.

Q.
    I recently downloaded my daily update a little early and found that I was missing some data. Is there any way to confirm if everything has been posted before I call for my daily update?

A.
    Yes. We have added a new interactive "Current Posting Status" screen to our website for that purpose. It tells you our expected time for posting each type of market and indicates whether or not those markets been updated for the current day. You'll find this feature on the Support screen of CSI website at www.csidata.com.

    This feature is particularly useful in helping you eliminate redundant downloads to pick up missing data. Extra updates are to be avoided whenever possible because a double-access surcharge applies if you frequently download data twice each day.

Q.
    I received an Unfair Advantage CD several months ago and it doesn't have all the features mentioned in the last CSI newsletter. Apparently, I don't have the latest version. How can I be kept up to date on upgrades of the Unfair Advantage program?

A.
   The CSI website's Support screen offers a link to "UA Program Updates," where you'll find a list of downloadable upgrades. It includes details on enhancements and known problems associated with each version. Please note that this newsletter often reports on features that are about to be released, so the versions discusses here may not be on the website just yet. When this happens, please check back in a few days to see if the enhanced version has become available.

Q.
    I'm considering running UA on an older computer with limited disk space. How much memory do the daily data updates for futures and stocks take up on my hard drive on a monthly basis?

A.
    The UA commodity database currently grows by about 650KB/month or 8 MB/year. The stock database grows by 4.7 MB/month or 56 MB/year. Fortunately, these numbers reflect a small percentage of the new multi-gigabyte drives now on the market. Our minimum hardware requirements are 60 MB disk space for commodities and 165 MB for commodities and stocks. You'll need at least a 200Mhz Pentium® processor to run the software. For optimal performance, we recommend using a system that exceeds our minimum requirements. That old computer will likely give you trouble with speed as well as storage space.

Q.
    Can I run Unfair Advantage on my WebTV®?

A.
    UA is a sophisticated data warehousing and analysis system that requires the services of a fairly sophisticated computer. The current WebTV is simply not up to the job because it lacks, among other things, a hard drive to store the UA database and necessary application programs.