We are in the process of improving the underlying workings of the autoinvestor to provide more accurate simulations. Specifically, the current implementation has a ‘survivor bias’, meaning that delisted stocks are not included in simulations. Once we complete our changes, the autoinvestor will be able to include stocks which are delisted today but which were trading on a given (past) date in the simulation. We have just deployed some intermediate changes to the autoinvestor strategy and simulations which should not affect the way that your strategies/simulations work. Please notify us immediately if you encounter any problems.

We will provide another news release when the final version of these modifications are present, which will provide for more accurate simulations.

We’ve had a handful of support requests for clarification of the units that Stockworm uses for volume. We have updated the manual but also wanted to give an explicit explanation in this news release

Units: Daily volume is PLOTTED (charts) in units of thousands of shares; however it is stored in our databases as shares so units of ‘shares’ should be used when designing TRADING SIGNALS (e.g. VOLUME > 1000000 for a min volume of 1,000,000 shares). Average volume is stored in millions of shares, so AVG_VOLUME > 1 would indicate a 3 month average volume greater than 1,000,000 shares in the FUNDAMENTAL SCREENER or SCREENER CUSTOM FILTER. We do apologize for the confusion

We have eliminated one of the parameters in the autoinvestor strategy: ‘lot rounding’ is now gone. The concept for lot rounding was that if, e.g. you specified lot rounding in the 10’s, a purchase of 112 shares would be rounded to 110 or, for lot rounding in the 100’s, 112 shares would become 100 shares. We recently realized that it was a bit silly to have the user manually specify the rounding factor and implemented an automated algorithm which rounds purchases to the ‘prettiest’ number of shares that it can without changing the purchase by more than 5%. The result: you no longer need to specify the ‘lot rounding’ factor, so this has been removed.

We‘ve added a new section which allows extended analysis of autoinvestor simulations. To access this section, go to your list of autoinvestor simulations, click on the check boxes for the simulations that you would like to analyze and then click on the ‘analyze checked simulations ‘ link on the left (just below the ‘plot checked simulations’ link which you have probably used before). This new section provides a variety of statistics such as the annualized simulation gain, the average gain, hold time and other statistics for closed positions, and average position size, liquidity of purchases, and other statistics for opens. To learn more, read the manual description of this new section (link).

We’ve added a much-requested feature to the autoinvestor strategies: you can now import watchlists into all of the autoinvestor rules which use lists of symbols. Specifically, the ‘add symbols’ and ‘excluded symbols’ open rules and ‘close symbols’ and ‘hold symbols’ close rules all now have an import link. We’ve also added a ‘clear’ link to quickly clear out the text field before re-typing in new symbols.