We are continuing to improve the autoinvestor for your use! We have now added some new pricing options for simulations. The ‘limit last close‘ is used to trade at the last closing price only if the simulation date low is less than or equal to the previous day‘s close (long purchases, short sales) or the simulation date high is greater than or equal to the previous day‘s close (long sales, short purchases). The ‘limit last extreme‘ is a bit more complex but in a nutshell, it limits long purchases (short sales) to the previous day‘s high and it limits long sales (short purchases) to the previous day‘s low.

Additional pricing options add a feasibility check by assuring that simulation day‘s volume is greater than 5 times the shares which the autoinvestor recommends for purchase or sale.

You may need to log out and then back in to your account to see these new options. Please see the manual for more details (link).

We have deployed an improvement to the autoinvestor simulation engine which allows the simulations to better enforce cash limits.

The autoinvestor simulation algorithm is a two step process for each date simulated. First, a recommended update to the simulated portfolio is created using only data from the previous date. Then the recommended update is applied to the portfolio using pricing data on the simulation date. This two step process simulates how a user would trade a real portfolio: step 1 would be to receive an autoinvestor email which is based upon the previous day‘s trading data and step 2 would be to trade the recommendations (using the current day‘s pricing).

You can use this background to better understand the improvement to our simulation process. In the past, we enforced cash limits in the autoinvestor update portion of the simulation (step 1) but not when applying the update (step 2). This has not caused any dramatic problems but it does leave open the possibility of having a negative cash balance which, for e.g. IRAs, would be not be allowed. The new algorithm enforces cash limits in step 2, thereby assuring that cash in the account never falls below cash limits, regardless of pricing on the day of the update.

We have had so many site users ask questions such as “what, exactly, is in your database“, “how often is the database updated“, “do you cover asset class xyz” that we went ahead and created a manual page to directly address this issue. If you go to the manual->data coverage section (link), you can see the latest dates that data has been loaded into the database, the number of stocks covered, and a number of other items of interest. We hope that this new page will be useful to all!

What started as a planned 8 hour upgrade window ended up as a bit of a nightmare for users and Stockworm staff alike. We encountered significant hardware problems during the upgrade which caused the site outage to last through Monday mid day.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience which this may have caused you. Please do take comfort in the fact that this inconvenience does have a positive outcome — the result is a faster, higher capacity server system for all to enjoy!

We will continue to work to provide you with reliable, fast service as our community grows!

We have added total free cash flow to the list of variables available for custom filtering. You can access it using the variable TOTAL_FREE_CASH_FLOW. If you‘d like to screen using the free cash flow per share, simply use the expression: TOTAL_FREE_CASH_FLOW / SHARES. For more details, please see the manual (link).