Dear Stockworm Subscribers,

It is with great regret that I must inform you that the Stockworm site, www.stockworm.com, will no longer be available to the public after June 30, 2006. The current user base is inadequate to support the expenses that we incur on a monthly basis for hosting a commercial web site, subscription to multiple data feeds, and payroll for support personnel.

In recognition of the inconvenience that this change may cause, you, our loyal customer, we will not bill your account again during this period and we will issue you a partial refund if your quarterly or annual subscription extends beyond June 30th.

Our “sister” company, Stockworm Capital Management, LLC (SCM) currently licenses the Stockworm, Inc. technology to manage client portfolios. After June 30, SCM will be the sole user of the technologies developed by Stockworm, Inc. The autoinvestor tool will continue to be studied and extended to the benefit of SCM clients. If you are interested in becoming an SCM client*, please contact us. Our minimum investment account is $250,000.

It has been our greatest honor to serve your investing needs over the past seven years. We wish you the best of luck in your future investing endeavors!

Best regards,

John M. Siegel Jr., Ph.D., President
Stockworm, Inc.

*SCM is an Investment Advisor registered in and regulated by Alabama so that we can enroll only a limited number of clients from each state outside of Alabama (most states allow a maximum of 5 clients for out-of-state advisors).

We have added a new option to the “screen within” expert screener parameters: issue type. You can now specify which issue type(s) you wish to be included in your screener results. Options include primary and secondary issues, Real Estate Investment Trust (REITs), American Depository Receipts (ADR‘s), Closed End Funds (Stock and Bond funds), and Limited Partnerships. For more details, see the manual (link).

We have extended the functionality of the symbol list in the expert screener options. Previously, you could specify a list of symbols in the screener expert option “screen within” to limit the screener results to this list of symbols. We have now added an option to exclude symbols from the list of symbols returned from a screener (it functions as a ‘screen within all symbols except my list'). This option is useful for excluding stocks where, for example, you may be an insider or you may wish to exclude the symbols used in a similar screener (e.g. find symbols similar to 'T' but exclude 'T' from the results). For details, see the manual (link).

For the last several months we have been working on expanding our pricing and fundamentals database to include a rolling 10 year history. As of today, this means that our database has been expanded from a starting date of September 1999 to January of 1995, thus providing a full 10 year history for simulations. After obtaining the necessary data from our data provider, a successful upgrade to our hardware, and extensive testing procedures, we are making the new data available on our web site.

Before you start using the data set, please make sure that you are aware of the following points:

First of all, the obvious: the biggest change is the ability to go further back in time with your screeners, charts, and autoinvestor simulations. However, the new data set comes from a slightly different source, and as a result, even the data from September of 1999 will be slightly different from our old data set. As a rule, it will cover more stocks and we believe it to contain fewer errors due to incorrectly reported splits or earnings or due to human error surfacing when company statements were being put into our data provider’s database. Therefore, do not be surprised if your new simulations return slightly different results from those obtained prior to the data rollover.

Secondly, we were not able to obtain a source for earnings estimates prior to September of 1999. And as such, those values and any other data that is computed based on earning estimates (in particular, various valuations) will still not be available prior to that date. If you wish to simulate strategies (or screeners) using the full data set, it is important that your strategies do not include parameters which are ‘estimates based’ – if you do, then your simulation will not purchase any stocks until 1999.

As a third point, several fundamentals that are being computed depend on availability of quarterly and annual reports. And as such, not all data will be available starting on January of 1994. In fact, it may take up to a year for some of the values to start appearing in our database. Therefore, we would recommend that you do not run autoinvestor simulations for dates prior to January of 1995.

We hope that availability of the deeper data set will help you improve your investment strategies and increase your returns! As usual, do not hesitate to contact us using the support form with any questions you may have.

We have added two new rules to the autoinvestor: the ‘market signal‘ open and close rules. These rules allow you to pick a symbol (e.g. dow jones, s&p 500, etc.) to define the market and then see if this symbol is in a buy or sell state, per your trading signal. The open rule will prevent you from opening any new positions unless the market is in the desired trading signal state. The close rule will close all positions whenever the market is in the specified trading signal state. Read more details in the manual (link).