AH I see, I think there is one program that we were talking about. It may have been spykiller.

Hi Spree99, what Bruce did not say is that it is hard to give this type of software a recommendation, as you have to buy the software to see how well it removes the ad/spyware programs. Also some of these programs will give a false hit. The way SpywareBlaster works is it installs registry entries that tells the install program that the program is already installed. A lot of the new pay adware programs that are coming out are hitting on the SpywareBlaster registry entries and saying that you have a lot of ad/spyware programs on your machine when you really don't have them. Ether this is poor programing, or they are doing it on purpose to get more sells. One program that has done this in the past is PestPatrol. PestPatrol does fix this in the next release, but you may have to wait awhile for that to happen. Bruce did go ahead and buy PestPatrol, so he is aware of its problems. If Spysweeper were to give the person who installed it even a one time use, we would be able to tell if it is giving false positive hits. I don't think we should have Bruce buy software in order to test it. However, if you have already bought Spysweeper you could give us a report on how well it works, and if it is compatible with SpywareBlaster. Being compatible with SpywareBlaster is very important, the author of the program is very aggressive about finding ad/spyware and developing blocks for them. He is normally ahead of all the other programs. Being that he is only trying to find out how to block the install program, he will normally have a block in place several days/weeks before the ad removal programs can find out how to safely remove a ad/spy program.

Hi Spree99, I cannot comment on the spysweeper, I have not tried it. But I was in walmart the other day and bought stealth web surfer put out by Cosmi for $9.95. If I am not mistaken it is actually Anonymous lite. It seemed to work ok, but it slowed down my internet, web sites took much longer to come up. I think this was due to everything going through the Anonymizer servers. It also could have been due to conflicts with other programs. I reformatted and reinstalled windows XP before installing SP2 I have not reinstalled stealth web surfer at this time. I normally try free software or low priced software. So far I have had better luck with the free software. one of my favorite free programs is WebWasher classic. http://www.webwasher.com/ look in the lower right corner of the page. SpywareBlaster not only blocks adware, but also blocks most of the tracking cookies, it also adds bad web sites to the restricted sites zone in IE browser. I am currently using the popup blocker in SP2.

There is a lot of controversy over SUF60RUNTIME right now. It is probably the installer for one of the last programs you installed. http://www.indigorose.com/sf/index.php It has the ability to connect to the internet. Here is some more info on it. http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=9848&highlight=SUF60RUNTIME

Hi Newly2b, where did you get your CWShredder from? You said you had, The CWS file is in C:\windows\drivers\audio\install.exe and the dialers are in C:\windows\Q312368.exe and Q307271.exe.
The proper place is http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/ how ever it is down right now. here is another safe place http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4086.html The reason I bring this up is that one of the p2p programs I have is peerguardian which is freeware. They had a warning on their site that one of the download sites was repackaging freeware and adding adware to the packages. Right now their web site is down, When I get a chance, I'll see if I can get the name of the BAD web site.

Hi Kurt, if you have Excel you can try some of my spreadsheets. The link is at the bottom of the header, let me know what you think.

Hi James, I remember that program, I went to their web site, they are on version 9 now. http://www.ipswitch.com/Products/WS_FTP/index.html Here is the only SP2 problem they have reported, but it's not about WSFTP. http://support.ipswitch.com/kb/IM-20040816-DM01.htm But they do send you to http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=842242 Which has the answer you want, look at the cuteftp, you ether have to open port 21 or enable ftp server. I would enable the ftp server, then when done using ftp disable it. In the ms firewall select advance, select your connection and click on settings enable ftp server.

By the way I like Winmx, I have to reinstall it, but I really liked the latest version. I also really like Shareaza, http://www.shareaza.com/?id=home between the two of them you have most of the major p2p networks covered. I plan on getting peerguardion or ProtoWall to block some IP addresses. You also need a program to make and maintain the block lists, that would be blocklist manager. you can get them here http://www.bluetack.co.uk/ and here http://methlabs.org/methlabs.htm
Two add on programs for Winmx are Leechammer, http://www.smartgamez.org/ and MXmonitor you can find it here. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j.buchanan/index.html A lot of people set up Winmx wrong and then say it is slow. That site has a lot of good info on how to set it up. Also see, http://www.vladd44.com/ , http://www.slyck.com/winmx.php?page=1 , http://home.bellsouth.net/p/s/community.dll?ep=16&groupid=77098&ck=

Hi wccawa, I think you misunderstand what Spywareblaster does! it does not look for adware.spyware or viruses! What it does is set a kill bit! that tells the activex program not to install, As it is already there. It is like when a insurance salesman comes to your door, you look out the window real quick and see what company he is from, then when you open up the door, you tell him that you just bought some from his company last week. So he turns around and goes after some other sucker. You lied to him. Here is another way to look at it, lets say in order to keep costs down each insurance company has a policy, when ever a salesman sells some insurance he puts a sign in your front yard that says this house bought insurance from us, don't stop here again! You being the smart man that you are, decide if you make your own sign and put it in the front yard, the insurance man won't stop and try to sell you some insurance. This work's so well that every time you hear that there is a new insurance company in town you make up a new sign and put it in the front yard. you now have thousands of signs in your yard! In this case the part of the yard that Spywareblaster is sticking signs is in the registry,at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\internet explorer\activex compatibilityYou can use regedit to look in that key and see all the signs.

The problem is with pestpatrol hitting on the sign! Bruce had pestpatrol hitting on a coolwebsearch sign a while back something which started with google if I remember right. He sent them a email explaining that it was hitting on Spywareblaster kill bit, and they fixed it in the next version. Right now you have a conflicts between the two programs. Spywareblaster wants the kill bit set, and pestpatrol sees that there is a key set, but does not check to see that it is the kill bit, and wants to remove it. However if you let pestpatrol remove it when twain-tech drives by he will stop and come knocking at your door. What you need to do is have pestpatrol leave it alone. If you all of a sudden start to get popup ads, then you know you really have something, and you can have pestpatrol clean everything. But don't worry about it now. I would send a email to pestpatrol. Spywareblaster currently sets kill bits and blocks cookies, and puts web sites in IE's restricted zone, it is covering 3132 items as of this morning. Most of that is with signs stuck in the registry.

Say James just call Scottie! But seriously what type of ftp program is it? If it is a server, you may have to go into the advance section of the firewall to enable ftp server. Also if you have a upnp router you need to turn on upnp framework in exceptions. Thats what I had to do for my p2p program. I already had the ports set up in the router and the sprint DSL modem. Worst case you may have open some ports. Your ftp programs help file should tell you which ones you need to open. But you don't want to go online with out a firewall running. I read the other day, that if you take a brand new computer and connect it to the Internet with out a firewall, it can be infected with in 20 seconds.

That same web page talks about Trend's sysclean program. But his link no longer gets you there. Here is a better link. http://www.trendmicro.com/download/dcs.asp About half way down the page it talks about, If you are not a Trend Micro customer, thats where the sysclean program is.

Which pest patrol are you using? the online scan sometimes gives false positives. Spywareblaster sets what is called a kill bit. Spywareblaster does not stay active. For active protection, try Spybot s&d, set the immunize function on, also click mode and change to expert, click on tools and then resident, then make sure both resident helpers are on.This web page has a removal procedure About half way down. http://www.able2know.com/a-computers-webdesign.php?start=10

Edit: that page had a link to stinger. may be worth looking at. http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/

First let me say I am surprised you can run PCcillin and AVG together! I once was testing AntiVir and shut it off instead of uninstalling it. When I installed Avast, the two both tried to run memory resident programs, and my windows XP crashed so bad that I had to reformat and reinstall windows. I think the best way is to pick one program for your computer, and use a online scanner also. Myself I use Avast, and Housecall. Housecall is made by trend micro, the same people who make PCcillin. http://housecall.trendmicro.com/housecall/start_corp.asp

on the web site it says the file is 437K what size do you have? I just downloaded it. it is only 1K in size! You may want to tell the web site they have a problem!

Right click anywhere on the start bar, and select task manager. hopefully it will work. Also have you tried starting in the safe mode? hold down F8 when you start windows.

SP2 installed at last! From previous messages. To bring you up to speed, due to the auto update program not starting up, and IE6 slowness, I felt there was a good chance I had a virus that was not being detected by ether Avast or Housecall on-line. So I reformatted and reinstalled windows XP. When you boot off the windows XP disk it gives you two options, install XP and repair XP. If you select repair XP it installs the repair console. First I wanted to make sure the boot files were good ones and not viruses! I ran fixmbr and fixboot. I then ran diskpart to delete all partitions, and to recreate them. I then cold booted the machine! That means pulling the power plug in some cases. You do this so there are no viruses in ram memory. I restored power, and booted off the CD again, this time I installed XP. Note I had the DSL modem turned off until I could make sure I had the XP firewall turned on. After XP I installed the latest version of Avast my favorite anti virus program, Installed my drivers, found a virus on the drivers CD. Once I got the drivers fixed I went to the update site and got all the SP1 updates. the auto program still was not engaging, so I installed Directx 9.0c, and then the auto update engaged. Right now it is sitting in the tray doing nothing! On the windows update site you can click on help and support, and then Microsoft newsgroup. I learned in there that the auto-update program has a log file in the windows folder called windowsupdate.log, at the bottom of the file in the last 20 lines or so you will find your update time. If it works correctly my update will start at 2004-08-25 03:00:00. If that time passes. I'll know I have a problem with the auto-update program.
Well the auto update program reset its install date to 2004-08-26 03:00:00, and then to 2004-08-27 03:00:00. Being that the SP2 manual install program was now in the windows update site, I did a manual install, and all is well so far! No slowness has been seen so far with IE6. I am slowly reinstalling programs will let you guys know of any snags along the way!

Hi Ken, I am going to guess that you have a cookie for the site that got corrupted. I think all you need to do is delete your cookies, and then sign back into the site. Note you will lose all your cookies, and so will have to sign in to any other web sites you use.

I had trouble getting autoupdate to even search for it. I was also having other IE problems like slow speed. So I reinstalled my xp, this time I installed my anti virus next, and then the drivers that xp does not get. I found that I had a virus on the drivers cd that came with my motherboard. Once I got the drivers fixed I went to the update site and got all the sp1 updates. the auto program still was not engaging, so I installed directx 9.0C, and then the auto update engaged. Right now it is sitting in the tray doing nothing! On the windows update site you can click on help and support, and then microsoft newsgroup. I learned in there that the autoupdate program has a log file in the windows folder called windowsupdate.log, at the bottom of the file in the last 20 lines or so you will find your update time. If it works correctly my update will start at 2004-08-25 03:00:00. If that time passes. I'll know I have a problem with the autoupdate program. Then I'll try the other way.

Thanks Gotfried, I just found it myself! Looks good, but I am already waiting on the autoupdate to kick in, and I don't want to download this twice. I've learned in the past that there is no way to cansul the autoupdate. You can stop it but when you reenable it it starts at the same download. There may be a way, but I don't know what it is.

What is this slipstream method?

Hi TC, remember when I talked about puting folders in the IE links tool bar. Well you can do the same thing in firefox, except in firefox you also get a open all the sites in tabs button also.

Sometimes you don't know who to trust! This is to all of you build it yourself people out there. This weekend I got ready for sp2, in the process I found a trojan virus on my motherboard's drivers CD. I was not really happy with the way my IE6 was preforming, Even though I had not been able to find anything wrong, it just wasn't right. So I reformated the hard disk. When you boot off the windows XP disk it gives you two options, install XP and repair XP. If you select repair xp it installs the repair consol. First I wanted to make sure the boot files were good ones and not viruses! I ran fixmbr and fixboot. I then ran diskpart to delete all partions, and to recreate them. I then cold booted the machine! That means pulling the power plug in some cases. I restored power, and booted off the cd again, this time I installed XP. Note I had the dsl modem turned off until I could make sure I had the xp firewall turned on. After XP I installed the latest version of Avast my favorite anti virus program. Normally I install all my drivers after XP, but not this time. Anyway I installed my sound card drivers and realized I had not installed my, on the motherboard vidio graphics card drivers, for some reasion XP nevers installs the right ones. So I put the drivers disk in, it autoran the install program, I selected autoinstall, and that was when Avast pulled the alarm! Turned out that one of the commands (reboot.exe) had a virus in it. Avast calls it a win32:Trojan-gen {DELPHI} virus, McAfee calls it a backdoor-rs virus. So far the last year I have had this virus on my machine. The thing about antivirus programs is most of them asuume that your machine is clean when you install them. When we had dos and the fat and fat32 format we could boot of a floppy and run a dos antivirus to make sure the hard drive was clean before installing the win version of the antivirus. I guess we need to look into that.
While you are thinking on this, put your motherboard Drivers cd in the cd and check it with your antivirus program!

Say Doug here is one to open the page in Opera, OperaView.
http://operaview.mozdev.org/

If you are like me and have trouble spelling. I just found this spell checker for Firefox! http://www.exchangecode.com/spellbound/

Well that was fun. NOT! After about a hour of trying to get this and any extension to install. I thought I was going out of my head. Just click on the link, thats what they say! I finally found the answer!
BTW, there is a new minor version of Firefox out 0.9.3! I thought that was the problem so I installed it! NOT!

OK here is the answer, In Firefox, click on tools then options, then click on the advance tab. Go down to Software update, you need to put a check mark in (Allow web sites to install software). That did it I got that extension to install. Note you have to restart firefox to use it.

PS: After you have installed all you extensions it would be a good idea to uncheck that box.

Hi Toofuzzy, I am trying to keep it simple but flexible, there are always trade offs.
You said
1)Use either the 52 week high and low or absolute historical high and low.
I feel this should be up to the investor. But I like the ideal of using the 52 week hi low prices, or price channel (not sure how many days would be best), or the NAIC's Stock Selection Guide work form.

2)Be 100% invested at low and 0% invested at high
I think this should be left up to the investor. The reason being a young investor, may want to use 0% and 100%, but a older investor may want to use less of a percentage range, like 40% and 60%.

3) formula: (High-Current Price)/ (High-Low Price) = % invested
This is very close to what I use but I keep the %invested between the high low ratio settings.

the next month the price drops so that the formula says to be 75% invested so: Add the current stock value to the $1,100 in cash plus the additional $200 cash added for the month. 75% of that is the amount of stock you want to own.
Doing the above would be so simple that a computer program wouldn't be needed. A minimum investment amount can be used to keep the trade sizes reasonable.
Put new cash where it is needed. But what happens when the formula tells you to own very little stock because stocks are near their highs? Maybe re-balance between the stock ACCOUNT (even though most of it will be cash) and the cash ACCOUNT (which will always be cash (or bonds).

This is what I plan on correcting next, right now my buy/sell triggers are getting in the way.

Hi Toofuzzy one can use whatever one wants, to come up with the high low prices.

I think this is a simple way of looking at it. Lets say that the stock has been going between $10 and $4, it gets to $10 and It does not come back down, So you let it go. But then some news come out on the stock and you are able to calculate new high low numbers, then what. Would you not reinvest using the new numbers! About unexpected price drops, I have not talked to much about it but it seems to me that no matter what type of system one uses one should have a stop loss order in place.

Hi Aim hier, I hate doing this to you, as I think you are one of the better thinkers around!
From your comments I feel that you have not been keeping up with the discussion on hi low investor!
From the start I have always said that determining the correct high low points would be a challenge. Part of the problem is that the correct points do not stay the same, they move over time. It is true I have not put much effort into that area of investing. There are many ways to try and determine the correct high low points. One could use past price history, this may work for short term investing. Myst has suggested using price channels to determine the high/low points.
Other investors feel that trying to use past price history is worthless, and you should use fundamental data about the company to determine if a company is selling at a good price now. They seem to forget that the fundamental data that they are using is in the past and is likely to have no bearing on how the company does in the future. But that is another story.
Myself, I am leaning toward the NAIC's method of determining the high and low prices.
other investors feel that supply and demand of a company's stock shares is the most important thing.
However you invest, you come up with two numbers, a high price where you want to sell out of a stock, and a low price where you are willing to invest (all the cash that is allotted to that stock) in the stock. If the price goes below that number you will want to get out of the stock, as it is no longer behaving the way you feel it should. As time goes on you will form new high low prices to use. If the stock is between your hi/ low prices you should be invested in it to some degree.

You said, You need to pick stocks of companies that are operating successfully and will continue to do so in the future. If that is the case, why sell all your shares at any point. Keep a core position and trade around it. That is the approach of AIM. But all of the systems depend upon you not choosing stocks of companies that are destined for bankruptcy.
Have you downloaded the hilowinvestordemo spreadsheet and played with it, or are you making comments on how you think the spreadsheet works!

Lets talk about formula plans. one of the oldest plans is the constant ratio plan. you split your money between stocks and bonds, and every so often you check on it, if it has become unbalanced by a great enough amount you re-balance it to the original ratio. This works great for preserving capital, A lot of the institutions have used it in the past. But it leaves a lot of potential profits on the table. So they came up with variable ratio plans, some plans were very simple some are complex, some are for stocks, and some are for indexes. Most use a central point where the ratio is 50/50, a lot of these fail due to not being able to move the central point. One of the variable ratio plan is called the Constant dollar plan. You pick a dollar value that you want to have invested in stocks, and as stocks values go up and down you buy and sell shares. It has two problems with it. Each time it comes back to the central point you find that the ratio has shifted some, over time you find that more and more of the portfolios value is shifted to the cash side. The other problem is there is no easy way to shift the central point.
AIM is a variable ratio plan that is based on the constant dollar plan. It corrects the problem of the ratio shifting when you get back to the central point, and as long as the central point does not shift to much, it can adjust for that to but it adjusts slowly. If the central point moves to far AIM can and will break down! That is why Tom has come up with all his rules for Veale's and reverse Veale's. Also AIM does not adjust well to adding or removing money from the plan well, there are a lot of rules for that also!

Don's Husky and LD AIM, both to my understanding use virtual dollars. While I guess there is nothing wrong in using virtual dollars in a formula, I would rather use the real dollars.

Myst's X-Dev, while Myst will disagree with me I still view it as being more for short term trading. Yes it does have its three day rule for getting back in, or out of a trade.

Incwave's system, is based on the constant dollar plan. and the William %R formula, they realized that a lot of the cash in a constant dollar plan is not used, they realized if they could determine the high and low points of the stock they could use the cash better. A problem I see with Incwave is that their stock limit does not increase automatically ( you can increase it manually), If you do not increase it at the right rate you could lose a lot of potential profits, if you increase it at the wrong time, you may not have enough cash on hand to meet the requests. I made a spreadsheet to correct these problems. I did not release this spreadsheet to the general public, I did send it to Incwave, if they want to use it in their program they can. The other problem is that with incwave you have to pay monthly to use their system. Which makes it out of range for most investors. I don't know how incwave derives their high low prices, other than they say they change after the company SEC reports come out. Incwave vary's the stock position from 0% to 100% of the stock limit. As you pointed out sometimes the high/ low prices may be off some. High low investor tries to correct for this, while it can go between 0% and 100%, I feel it is better to go between 10% and 90%, or 20% and 80%, or what ever. I also decided not to use a stock limit, I think it is better to use the total portfolio value.
Nuff said!

Hi Doug, If you have a mouse with a wheel and the wheel has a click when you press it down, it is the same as a three button mouse. If the program has settings for a third button, the settings should work. In IE you should get a auto scroll function and the pointer will change to ether a two or four point stationary symbol. On some of the extra mouse programs that hang in the tray box you can change the funtion.

Hi Myst,thanks for the vote of confidence. In the next main version I am planning to put in delay buying and selling. While nothing is 100 percent, I hope it will increase the profits.

PS: I doubt if I get to a profit of $135,756,473.25, but the fun is in trying! Right now it is able to beat AIM if the correct hi and low points are used, but it still falls behind Synchrovest.

Hi Toofuzzy, most on how the system work's is explained in posts 452 and 453. In post 453 disregard the PS: about short selling and buying on margin!

>>>>I do need people to download and play with the spreadsheet and give me feedback on this feature, is it good or bad? Do you think it would be better to rebalanced even though the price did not move? I can see debating it either way.<<<< I can see the Hi - Low formula either telling you what % of stock to OWN in your TOTAL portfolio or telling you what % to invest with the CASH you have left (and just added). I can't see it telling you to invest some % of your TOTAL portfolio if your portfolio is $100,000 and you are adding $500/month. If it is the first (% of stock to OWN) then you will own very little stock as it approaches its HIGH and will be 100% invested as it reaches a previous low.

I think I see what I should do here, If a person is adding or removing money, the portfolio should be rebalanced if the amount exceeds x amount( this may end up being a percent of total portfolio value, maybe 10%), otherwise the re-balancing would wait until the price change exceeds the buy/sell trigger percents.

If it is the first (% of stock to OWN) then you will own very little stock as it approaches its HIGH and will be 100% invested as it reaches a previous low.
As you added more money near a low it would all be invested. If that is what you are doing it sounds even more straight forward than AIM. As it breaks an old HIGH you have nothing invested though. I am trying to make it straight forward and hopefully easier than aim.

On the high and low price points, one can change them anytime one wants to new values, this is up to each investor, and is the most subjective and hardest part of the system. currently the high/ low ratio settings are set on the setup page. I think I need to add the ability to change them on the second sheet also. If one is absolutely sure what the high and low prices should be, one should set the ratios at 0% and 100%. But how many of us are that sure? If you set the high ratio at 10% and the low ratio at 90%, no matter how high the stock goes you stay at 10% of total portfolio value invested, and if the stock drops you still have 10% of total portfolio value in cash.

It is a very flexible system, say you are a senior investor, And you want your money invested in stocks and bonds in roughly 40/60 percent but you are willing to have it very by +- 10% just set your low ratio to 30% and the high ratio to 50% on each of your stocks. I suppose once a year one would still want to re-balance your stocks.

Say Manny, were you ever able to post the link to your pcpitstop results? When you do the tests you will see a yellow box with a link to pcexprees, click on that. On the new page you will see a yellow box with a url in it. Highlight it and copy it, then post a message to Bruce with the url pasted in it. That way we can check out what programs are running on your machine! Who knows what else that homepage stealer is doing to your system. I think you need to use IE to do the test on pcpitstop. I just hate the idea of having crap running around on your machine! Also it sounds like it may be a new version, being that you are having so much trouble getting rid of it.

Hi toofuzzy, the best way is for you to download it and play with it! But to answer your questions.
If you were investing monthly or even quarterly, do you ever get to invest more than 100% to use up the cash you didn't invest in the past? Or do you just use the % of the cash you have already set aside?
The answer is, yes you can invest more than the monthly installment. The percentage is applied to the total portfolio value.
So if I have $1000 and I am adding $200 this month so I have $1200. If the formula tells me to invest 50% do I invest $100 or do I invest $600?
When you set up the spreadsheet, you put your $1,000 in and at a 50% you would be directed to invest $500 in to stock. The next month you have $200 to invest, If the stock price has remained in the same price, all the $200 would go to cash. Once the price moves then the portfolio will be rebalanced to the new ratio.
I do need people to download and play with the spreadsheet and give me feedback on this feature, is it good or bad? Do you think it would be better to rebalanced even though the price did not move? I can see debating it either way.

Sounds like that is normal.

While playing with the hilowinvestordemo.xls spreadsheet the other day. I was using the 10,8,5,4,5,8, and repeat data. I put the hi at 8 and the low at 5. I had the low ratio set at 0.0% and the hi ratio set at 100%. I was sure prized at first to see that I had doubled my profits even though I was missing both the hi and the low prices. After A little bit of thinking I realized that I was using only 8 and 5, and was investing 100% at the low, and selling 100% at the top, which gave more profit than spreading the buy and selling between 10 and 4. So I may need to think in a more nonlinear fashion. Currently hi/low investor invests in a linear fashion. It takes the (high-current price)/(high-low) price to get a percentage between 0 and 100 percent. 50% is invested in the upper half and 50% in the lower half. But what if we invest only 25% in the upper half, and 75% in the lower half? It should lead to more profits, especially if we can sell only 25% in the lower half and sell 75% in the upper half. So I am starting on a new spreadsheet, to see if I can solve the problem.

While I am glad for all the new posts, I would prefer to have more on new ways to invest. I think the chart was only for showing the price channels. I think I got it.

Hi Myst, I think the use of a price channel could work with the hilowinvestordemo.xls spreadsheet , for short term investing. The spreadsheet is already using a type of William %R formula. I am more interested in trying to find tools to determine long term hi/low price levels. One that I have read is the NAIC work sheets, from the book Starting and Running a Profitable Investment Club.

Looks like the beta version is being blocked from leaving the site. I got the same results that you did.

test

Is the beta version available for free? If so could you provide a link?