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.

We are experiencing delays in our data feed from Morningstar. We are working with Morningstar to remedy this problem and will update the stock database as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

We‘ve expanded! (Well sort of.) Due to suggestions from our users we‘ve added 6 new variables which are available for custom filters in screeners and strategies. These variables are:

• employees
• inventory turnover (ratio)
• receivables turnover (ratio)
• cost of sales (millions of $)
• accounts payable (millions of $)
• gross operating profit (millions of $)

There‘s specific information available in our manual. These work just like other fundamental variables with data going back to 1/3/1994.

Please let us know if you notice any problems or oddities. Also, feel free to drop us a support note if there are any other fields you like to see.

Thanks to continued prodding from our users we‘ve implemented a new option for periodic portfolio / strategy rebalancing.

Strategy rebalancing can be set to different intervals such as monthly or quarterly (rather than the default of daily). The strategy then only buys and sells on those dates. With the addition of a stop loss rule, you could over-ride this behavior and have the strategy sell in between these dates.

However there was a small catch. The strategy would immediately issue a buy to fill this slot.

We‘ve therefore made a small change to the rebalance rule which now optionally sells but NOT buys in between dates. The value is that this very closely mimics the typical practice of trading on specific dates (eg quarterly) and then placing a stop loss/gain order at the same time.

For a little better description please take a look at the Stop Loss forum post