Screens and Autoinvestor updates have had problems lately and these tools aren‘t reporting current data. Historical data before 10–10-2011 is ok but we‘re experiencing issues with data after that from our provider Morningstar.

The data they are sending us has been in the wrong file format and we aren‘t able to parse it properly. John and I (mostly John) are working on changing our parsing code to read their data. Morningstar is simultaneously continuing to work on getting their data back into the proper format.

No estimated time for a fix but we‘ll keep you informed as things progress. We are very very sorry for the inconvenience and trouble this has caused our subscribers.

We are pleased to announce the addition of three new variables, for use with screeners and autoinvestor strategies:

• EBIT - Total Income before Interest Expenses (EBIT), equals Income after depreciation adjusted for interest income, other income, net and any special income or charges but before subtracting interest expense and taxes.


• LONG_TERM_DEBT - the amount of borrowings due after one year from the date of the balance sheet


• SHORT_TERM_DEBT - represents the amount of borrowings (principal and interest) that must be paid in the near future (usually one year).

We hope that these will prove useful to you!

The Stockworm team has always valued your feedback and has used your input to improve the site over the years. We have now added a ‘feedback’ button which is always on the right-hand side of each web page. This button allows you quick and easy access to give us your thoughts. We encourage you to use it!

We‘ve added a new market breadth indicator called “One Year High Low Ratio”. It‘s market-based and is the ratio of stocks achieving new one year highs to those achieving new one year lows. The indicator varies from 1 (all new price extrema are highs) to -1 (all new price extrema are lows).

The One Year High Low Ratio is computed over the universe of stocks as:

(high count – low count)/(high count + low count)

where high count and low count are counts of stocks achieving new one year highs and lows, respectively. The ‘universe‘ of stocks for this ratio is the entire Stockworm stock database which has traded on a given day.

This number could have pretty hefty daily swings so it may be best to average it over 5 to 10 trading days. A simple trading signal can be developed that goes long when the moving average, say for 5 periods, is greater than zero. This does a nice job of bracketing the downturn of 2008 as well as the bear market in 2000.

This indicator was an outgrowth of a user request in the forums and seems pretty positive. Try it and let us know what you think. We‘d be especially interested in ideas for trade signals based on it.

We‘ve moved up the time we update our database by about an hour. What this means is autoinvestor email updates will now arrive about 2:30 CST each morning. Also, the previous days online data will also be available at this time. This will give a bit more time to get the current days trades done before the market opens.