Here's your chart:

Testing. A user said this no longer works:



and yet it seems to...

iHub'bers, StockCharts.com needs your help.

Over the years we have allowed live versions of our charts to be added to iHub posts. The only restriction we've asked in return is that posters limit the number of live charts per message to 4 or fewer. (That restriction has been posted on our website and in the iBox of this board for years.)

Unfortunately, there is one iHub member that has continually ignored that policy for years. He has continually posted dozens of live charts in single messages despite our asking him not to. Those messages cause unnecessary load on our servers and violate our 4-charts-per-post policy. One way or another, those messages have to stop.

At this point we need all of iHub'bers who'd like to see StockCharts charts remain on iHub to do two things:

1.) Send a private message to "Tony_from_MI" and tell him to stop violating our posting policy. Maybe a full mailbox will get his attention.

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.aspx?user=31439

2.) Watch for other examples of this kind of abuse and inform the message poster of our policy.

The unfortunate reality is that we cannot continue to provide live charts on iHub is this kind of abuse continues, nor can we be the only ones watching out for it. We need help from all the iHub fans of StockCharts in order to continue providing this kind of free service to the iHub community.

Thanks for your help,
Chip Anderson
President, StockCharts.com, Inc.

Basic User Test:

Simple Chart:


Complex Chart:

Free User Chart Test:

USDollar - There are several things that you can do to help with the problems you mention:

1.) Turn off the "Line Smoothing" checkbox if you find the lines are too "fuzzy" for your liking.

2.) Turning off "Line Smoothing" and reducing your grid density will also reduce the filesize of the chart and thus speed up downloading.

3.) Several users have reported that SharpCharts2 looks much better on an LCD screen rather than a CRT monitor. We recommend using a LCD screen with at least 1024x768 resolution.

In addition, our SharpCharts2 Instructions and FAQ page has other suggestions for SharpCharts1 users:
http://stockcharts.com/support/SC2Manual.html
http://stockcharts.com/support/SC2FAQ.html

Finally, as I have said _numerous_ times, the best way to give us feedback is to use the "Report Problems" link below the chart with the issue. That way we can see the _exact_ chart you are looking at and get a much better understanding of your concerns. Reporting problems via iHub just leaves us guessing.

- Chip

Thanks for helping us get the message out Alan. I've been saying that for months here on iHub, on StockCharts.com, and in our newsletter. Hopefully, most of the readers here are aware of the impending changeover. If anyone reading this is not familiar with our plans, please review my message #4250 from April 13th:
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=10657605

Alan, with respect to your adjectives "awful", "horrible", "dreadful", etc. We couldn't disagree more however we'd love to hear specifics about the problems you are having. Please create a SharpCharts2 chart that you believe doesn't have the functionality that SharpCharts1 does and then click on the "Report Problems" link below the chart and send us a problem report so we can look into it. You'll see several example lower down in this very forum where we were able to address users' concerns successfully.

- Chip

Full Documentation for SharpCharts2 is now available:

http://stockcharts.com/support/SC2Manual.html

Please let us know if you spot any problems or have suggestions for improvements.

- Chip

Thanks Robert,

We're always glad to hear from our long-term users especially when it comes to subjective things like colors and "brightness". There are so many different kinds of charts, it is hard to test all the color combinations thoroughly.

We went back and compared the SC1 versions of your charts with the SC2 versions to try and see if we could spot the "dullness" in the Sunset color scheme that you referred to. We did spot a couple of things on your charts that were not that noticeable on our test charts and made some changes as a result. Please check out the SC2 version of your Public Chart list again and see how things look now.

If you (or anyone else here) have additional feedback for us, please use the "Report Problems" link below any SC2 chart so we can see the exact chart you are looking at. Also, please try to be as specific as you can about the problem. We realize that things like "sharpness" are hard to describe in specific terms, but the more specific people are, the better we can response to the concern.

Finally, remember that SharpCharts2 really shines when you create new charts using the new color schemes and the new features. See the first article in last week's newsletter for some examples of the great new charts you will be able to publish once SC2 is fully released.

http://stockcharts.com/commentary/archives/cww20060416m.html

- Chip

Let me be clear: Yes, everyone will be "forced" to convert to SharpCharts2.

I have been saying that for months in the newsletters, in our FAQs and on our website. If that message somehow did not reach you until now I apologize, but that's the bottom line here and I don't want to fool anyone about it.

SharpCharts2 has been in "Beta" release for over two years now. We have taken literally thousands of suggestions for improvements from people during that time and have crafted a system that is far superior to SharpCharts1. Overlaid charts, candlevolume charts, indicators of indicators - I could go on and on. In addition to adding tons of new features, we have strived to make SharpCharts2 a superset of SharpCharts1's capabilities and we now feel that we have succeeded. For months now I have been asking for people to let us know if there are aspects of SharpCharts1 that they rely on which are not in SharpCharts2 and we have made numerous adjustments based on that feedback.

(Even at this late date, we are still interested in hearing about any specific things that SharpCharts1 can do that SharpCharts2 cannot.)

Starting in February, we have been slowly integrating SharpCharts2 into all areas of our website. As I have said all along, when that process is complete SharpCharts1 will no longer be available. We do not have the resources to support two major charting engines at the same time. It has taken every ounce of energy we have to do that during this Beta period and we cannot continue to support two engines once SharpCharts2 is completely rolled out.

We agree with the idea that there should be a long transition period whenever a major change like this occurs. That is exactly why we've put SharpCharts2 through a two-year, 7-release Beta period. If you haven't become familiar with SharpCharts2 during that period, I don't know what to say. If you go back through our newsletters and emails, you'll see that we've been trying to get everyone prepared for this transition for many, many months.

In Summary:

SharpCharts1 is no longer available for Basic and free users. Soon it will no longer be available for Extra members as well. If you are an Extra member, NOW is the time to learn SharpCharts2 and let us know if you have any problems.

WE ARE ANXIOUS TO HEAR FROM YOU! The best way to tell us about problems is to use the "Problem Report" link below the SharpCharts2 chart - that way we will get an exact duplicate of the chart you were looking at when the problem occured.

For Help with transitioning to SharpCharts2, be sure to read the "Instructions" link located just below the chart. We will also be releasing our new on-line documentation for SharpCharts2 in the next week or so.

- Chip

ATTENTION BASIC MEMBERS: We've completed your upgrade to SharpCharts2!

All of your stored charts have been automatically converted to the new format. Your Basic chart list should work just like it always has and you should now be using the SharpCharts2 workbench to do all of your chart analysis. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS: First click on the Instructions link located immediately below the chart. If your question isn't answered there, send us a problem report.

EXTRA MEMBERS: Hang tight! We plan on converting your accounts over to SharpCharts2 in the next couple of weeks. Be sure to read the latest issues of our free ChartWatchers newsletter for the latest information.

Please read the "Board Info" section of this area for help with posting charts in iHub.

Click "Show Board Info" if you can't see the instructions and examples.

Basically, you have to click "Linkable Version" BEFORE adding your chart to iHub.

- Chip

Mark, Please use the Support form on our website to report your login problem. http://stockcharts.com/support/techsupport.html

I checked our support database and did not find any recent emails from someone saying that they could not log in. That makes me suspect that your emails were not delivered for some reason. Without your email address however I cannot be certain. Again, the best way to contact us is via the Support form on our website.

- Chip

Edit: Just noticed the email address in your iHub profile. I searched for that email address in our database and came up empty.

$NAA50R is based on our ScanEngine results. Those results are from NASDAQ stocks that we track that have an average of 80,000 shares traded over the past 20 days.

$NATOT is based on the values of advancers/decliners/unchanged stocks as published by the NASDAQ.

The reasons for these distinctions is more historical than anything else but they are not intended to be mixed in this manner.

- Chip

StockCharts.com will be offline for about 2 hours tonight starting at 11PM Eastern for regular maintenance. Please plan accordingly.

- Chip

SharpCharts2 Beta 7 is now available.

New features include the ability for Extra members to save charts and settings in their account, three line break charts, fewer round-trips to the server, and much more.

Here is a link to the release notes:
http://stockcharts.com/support/SC2Manual.html

Here is a link to the Beta 7 charting tool:
http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui

(Members should login from our home page first in order to see all of the SharpCharts2 features.)

Chip Anderson
President, StockCharts.com, Inc.
http://stockcharts.com

Scheduled Maintanence - 10PM Saturday Night

From our newsletter:

As part of the changes we are implementing in response to last months service interruption, StockCharts.com will be offline tonight (Saturday, Dec. 10th) from 10pm to 12am (US Pacific time) for system maintenance. Past statistics have shown us that very few people are actively using the site at that time and so hopefully this will not inconvenience too many people.

- Chip

Re: Access to Philadephia Exchange-based Indices

We are taking the necessary steps to ensure that our users continue to have access to the various indices that you mentioned. At this point, we do not anticipate any interruption in their availability.

Even though our data vendor is Thomson Financial, we do not get any special break or discount from the arrangement mentioned in the press release. Basically, the press release is saying that the Philadelphia exchange now has the ability to charge for index data that it used to provide for free.

As you can see from the press release (and Ameritrade's problems), staying on top of the ever-changing world of indices is a challenge - one that we have to deal with constantly. This is not the first time an exchange has decided to charge seperately for data that used to be free and it won't be the last. Note however that Stockcharts.com has not changed its fee structure in years. While it is possible that we may be forced to pass along these odious fees in the future, we are doing our darnest to avoid that for now. Unfortunately, because the exchanges are monopolies, all we can do is continue to hope that the people who publish this data stop trying to unfairly profit from it. The recent trend in this area is not promising however.

- Chip

While the "Want to log out?" link will prevent other people from accessing your account from that same browser (and therefore is recommended when using a shared computer), it will not reset the 15-minute restriction that ExtraRT members have for switching computers/browsers in the middle of the trading day.

That restriction is in place at the specific request of the NYSE and Nasdaq stock exchanges. There is nothing we can do to change it. We recommend that ExtraRT member schedule their site usage so that they do not have to quickly change from one computer to another during the trading day.

- Chip

In order to view intraday charts on iHub, the browser window you are using must be logged into your StockCharts.com account.

For example, if you use MS IE to log into StockCharts, and then use Firefox to view iHub, it won't work. For another example, if you open up iHub in one IE window, then use a new IE window to log into StockCharts, then try to view and intraday chart using your original IE window, it won't work. You have to log into StockCharts.com first, then - using the same browser window - view the iHub post with the Intraday chart.

Other things to check:
Make sure that cookies are enabled and working in your browser.
Accept all cookies that StockCharts.com sends you when you log in.
Clear your browser's Temporary Internet cache.
Make sure your computer isn't out of disk space.
Make sure your computer's date is set correctly.

If you still have trouble, please send a report in using our support form on http://stockcharts.com/support/techsupport.html
Please send in that report using the browser window that you were using to try and see the iHub post with.

- Chip

We experienced problems with one of our two internet connections starting at 2:17AM Pacific time on Thursday, Nov. 24th. The problem was fixed at 8:12AM Pacific time. During that time roughly 50% of the requests to our website did not work. Please let us know if you are continuing to experience problems. We apologize for any inconvenience this problem may have caused.

StockCharts Support
http://stockcharts.com

When it rains, it pours. At 9:30AM Sunday morning, we experienced a prolonged power outage at our data center. Our backup power systems kept the site working for a couple of hours, but the power outage exceeded their capacity. The power is back on now and we are restarting our systems. We expect to have the site back online within the hour. We apologize for any inconvenience this outage has caused.

Dimension,

We have replied to your inquiries time and time and time again. You have "spammed" us with this question 12 times at least and we have responded each time with the same answer.

We can only conclude one of the following: Your spam filters must be deleting our messages, you don't like the answer we are giving you, or you have unreasonable expectations of what our site can provide.

For the benefit of everyone else in the public forum, your question revolves around why are we using ABV/C in our Bullish Percent calculation and not it's counterpart stock ABV.

As we explained, we remove duplicate charts from our NYSE Bullish Percent list so that a single stock does not have an undue influence on the results. That means that stocks that have more than one class are only represented once on our calculations. We use ABV/C because that was on our original list and we don't make substitutions unless absolutely necessary.

Your persistance in demanding an answer to this issue is perplexing at best, irritating at worst. "Spamming" our support team with the same message again and again will only get your email address added to _our_ spam filters.

As it says in our FAQ area, if you don't get a timely answer to your messages try these things: make sure your Spam filters aren't intercepting things, make sure you are using a professional tone, make sure that you state your issue clearly, and make sure you indicate why your issue is important to your use of our site.

- Chip

We don't support Monthly scans.

http://stockcharts.com/FAQ-Scans.html#scanperiods

- Chip

Some Notes on Wednesday's outage for our users:

First off, I want to once again apologize for the outage that affected everyone on Wednesday. While we can't undo the past, yesterday we added 7 days of free service to the accounts of all active member in response to the site being down from 9:30AM to 3:00PM on Wednesday.

I see some misconceptions in some posts here that need to be addressed.

The biggest concern I have is the idea that StockCharts.com doesn't care about its users. That is not correct. The staff here moved mountains on Wednesday to find and fix the problem with the site. No one suffers more pain (mental, financial, and even physical) than we do when things don't work. The additional week of time we are giving our members works out to well over $100K of subscriber revenue. The indirect costs (good will, lost productivity) are probably even more valuable.

Even though our key people were focused on fixing the problem, we also made several efforts to keep all of our users informed about the status of things. Before we fully understood the issue, we posted messages in the "Site News" section of the Members page. This is our standard procedure for informing members about site issues. Later, when it because apparent that the problem was going to be harder to solve, we created a separate website that did nothing but keep people informed about things.

Here's a link to a copy of that site with our update messages:
http://stockcharts.com/sitedown

Once the site came back up, we continued informing our members of the status every couple of hours. In all, we posted nine messages about this problem on our site.

Given that our site was offline for some of the time, we probably should have posted some messages in some other locations (like this iHub forum). I apologize for not doing that. I will work with our support staff to increase their use of this resource in the future.

Understandably, with the site having trouble, several people here vented their frustration. Let me address a couple of inaccuracies that crept into those posts:

1.) Blame - Ultimately, Wednesday's issue appears to have been caused by an intermittent failure in some networking hardware here at StockCharts. While we are constantly working to make our system as stable and reliable as possible, we obviously have more work to do. Rest assured that we are continuing to invest HEAVILY in upgrading and improving our hardware and software so that things like this don't happen again. To be clear, we don't see any evidence at this time that the problem was caused by our data vendor.

2.) Customer Service - We have invested heavily in improved customer service over the past 12 months. During that time alone, we have answered over 15,000 customer inquiries. Like everything else on the site, we are continuing to improve our customer service abilities.

3.) Company Size - StockCharts.com is a collection of hard working people who are dedicated to providing great technical analysis tools to to the web. For what it's worth, we are not as big as Google, Yahoo, CBS MarketWatch (who owns BigCharts) or InvesTools (who just bought Prophet.net). Since we are private, I can't discuss our finances publicly, but you can get some sense of what things are like in this business from the press releases that came out when Prophet.net was acquired:

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050127/275320_1.html

4.) DecisionPoint.com Indicators - We, StockCharts, do not own any of the content on DecisionPoint.com. We are not legally able to provide Carl Swenlin's indicators or datasets to StockCharts.com subscribers.

5.) Date Ranges (9 months / 10 years) - our new SharpCharts2 Beta 5 tool allows you to quickly choose any duration setting you want from 1 day to 10 years, 12 months, and 31 days. Check it out: http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui

This link has details on creating long-term charts with our regular version of SharpCharts:
http://stockcharts.com/FAQ-Charts.html#longterm

6.) 65 and 130 minute time frames - Sorry, but we can't do those. I'm unaware of any online service that can.

OK, I have to get back to work on our new streaming tool (available "soon" so don't ask). Again, I'll see if I can get our support people to monitor this forum more actively. The best way to get help from us however is still to use our Feedback page:
http://stockcharts.com/support/techsupport.html
If your message is clear, polite and detailed, we'll be able to help you quicker.

- Chip

http://stockcharts.com/def/servlet/SC.web?c=$SPX,uu[f,a]dallnyay[d19980503,20030602][pc20!c160!f][vc...

OK,

We are knocking on lots of wood right now BUT things seem to be back to "normal" as of about 10AM this morning. The datafeed came back in the middle of the night but it took us some extra time this morning to get everything converted back from the temporary feed that we had been using. So far, things have been back for about an hour and we _think_ we are out of the woods.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. We will be automatically extending the memberships of our active members by one week (7 days) as a result of this episode. In case you are curious, that's roughly $33K in free time we are handing out. You don't need to write in to receive this time - if you were and active member as of yesterday, it will be adding to your account automatically.

One final thing, please remember to check the "What's New" area of the homepage if you experience problems with the site. That's the first place that we post information on site issues like this.

Chip Anderson
President, StockCharts.com
http://stockcharts.com

To elaborate on today's data feed problems:

The dedicated, secure, high-speed circuit that we use to get our data from our data vendor suddenly went dead this morning right after the market opened. At the time, I was at 33,000 feet somewhere over Wyoming. Our brave crew of developers worked hard with our data vendor to restore the feed and find out what happened. At this point, the best info we have is that a fiber connection somewhere was "cut". Our understanding is that there are telecommunications workers somewhere working full-time on restoring that circuit.

We were able to establish a temporary connection to an alternate datafeed using our Internet circuit. Unfortunately, that connection is not fast enough to handle all of the traffic that our site throws at it. (All of these problems were discovered via good 'ol trial and error of course.) We were able to provide intraday/real-time quotes on our daily charts, but updated intraday charts proved to be too much for this temporary feed. Until the direct circuit is "un-cut", we'll continue to provide what data that we can.

This kind of problem falls into the "lightning strick" category and is very disappointing to us considering that we have just completed a $50K upgrade to our server facilities in preparation for our real-time service. That fact that it happened on the day I flew to the Florida trade-show is very frustrating. Obviously, we are now considering a secondary connection path to our data vendor however those things are expensive and slow to install.

We appreciate the patience of everyone who uses our service. We are considering some kind of compensation for this outage but we won't have a decision on that until things are "back to normal". For those of you that expected immediate responses from our support people during the start of this episode, we apologize. Everyone needed to focus on troubleshooting the problem.

I will post another message here when we know more.

Chip

Our Real-Time approval from the NYSE has just come through. Non-professionals who want non-delayed charts can now upgrade (or subscribe) to our ExtraRT service. See the "What's New" section of our home page for details.

Chip
http://stockcharts.com

I just get a blank page w/a small box w/circle,square and triangle.

It sounds like you do not have Java installed on that computer. Microsoft recently stopped included Java on new XP machines. Here's a link where you can get it:

http://java.sun.com/getjava/download.html

Chip
http://stockcharts.com

It sounds like you are starting by annotating an existing snapshot. You only get the choice to save _new_ charts as dynamic or static (snapshot). Simply enter a ticker symbol into the "SharpChart" box in the upper right corner of any page to create a new chart. You can then click "Annotate" and get the option to save as a dynamic chart or a snapshot.

Chip
http://stockcharts.com

Re: Lost Lists

We have backups of everyone's lists going back back for a couple of weeks / months.

If your list is totally lost, send a request into our Support form asking for your list to be restored from our backups. Please include the name of the list and/or as many of the ticker symbols in the list that you can remember.

http://stockcharts.com/support/techsupport.html

Please Note: We can only do this for unusual situations. We cannot do it on a recurring basis.

Chip
http://stockcharts.com

Intraday information is (knock on wook) back on-line now.

Chip
http://stockcharts.com

Re: I can't log on to stockcharts even though my subscription is current and my ID and password are correct. Is there a problem?

I need to know your userID and/or name in order to find your account in our database and research the issue. Please send me that information via an iHub Private message or via our Support form:

http://stockcharts.com/corp/techsupport.html

Chip
http://stockcharts.com

Hang in there Illyia, we're working the problem hard. Here's the poop:

Nasdaq's recent changes to their data system finally caught up with our data vendor who forced us to upgrade servers this weekend. Despite tons of simulated testing last week, things didn't work well this morning when we went live with their new stuff. Basically, getting intraday data for a large percentage of stocks is taking 10 times longer than it ought to which bogs everything on the site. We have disabled intraday charts until the problem is fixed and, yes, we are calling them at least once a hour for status reports. When things are fixed, you'll see intraday charts on our homepage again.

Chip
http://stockcharts.com

Re: Had you looked at the chart during the "limted time" mentioned above (i.e., on October 18), you would have seen...

For the record, I responded to your message about one hour after it was posted here (i.e., on October 18). I actually saw your snapshot chart less than 20 minutes after you posted it. I never saw the invalid quote you are referring to. Since we haven't seen the problem, we haven't taken any steps to correct it, however we are anxious to hear if it happens again.

I should also point out that using automated scripts to pull charts from our website is prohibited by our Terms of Use agreement. Specifically:

"You must access the information manually by request and not programmatically by macro or other automated means."
http://stockcharts.com/corp/terms.html

Chip
http://stockcharts.com

Re: $GOLD Chart

Can you be more specific about the problem that you are seeing? I'm not seeing it on this end. Be sure to describe what you are seeing in the text of your message - the chart may change or look different by the time we investigate on this end.

The snapshot that you posted has a 10/17 closing price for $GOLD (continuous contract) of 311.60. Right now, Kitco.com shows the closing price for Spot Gold was 311.50 on 10/17.

http://www.kitco.com/charts/popup/au24hr3day.html

So I'm not sure that I agree when you say "The closing price is way off." What data are you basing that on?

Similarly, StockCharts' closing price for $GOLD on 10/16 is 314.0 and Kitco.com's is 313.7 - a wider gap, but still explainable by differences between spot prices and continuous contract prices.

Below your second chart, you state "the date is the same but the closing price is very different (and correct)" On the chart I'm looking at, the data is identical to the data in the first chart you posted. So now I'm really confused. Did your snapshot change already?

Regardless of where the confusion is happening, here's how things work: We update our $GOLD price at the end of each trading day with the latest info from our data vendor. Each day, we update the quotes for the last couple of days in case the data vendor has made any corrections to their data. Corrections are made by the data vendor for a variety of reasons including bad trades, odd lots, and data processing errors. It's possible that our 16-Oct $GOLD quote was updated at the end of the day yesterday via this process - I don't really know. If it was, it may be the cause of what you saw.

Chip
http://stockcharts.com

Thanks Bob. Actually, I was able to carve out some time yesterday to redo how the scan results page works. As a result, the size of the results page is roughly 75% of what it used to be and the system resource utilization was similarly decreased. Even though that doesn't matter to WinXP users like you and me, it does result in faster downloads and definitely helps the Win98/ME crowd.

Chip
http://stockcharts.com