Can StockFinder 5 finally replace TeleChart? You would expect the answer to be a resounding yes, but it is not that simple.

I like TeleChart. It looks like it was written 15 years ago so you would expect to find it in the dumpster next to Windows 95, but no, despite some obvious short-comings, it is  one of the better trading tools out there. If you are computer savvy, you can probably use the majority of the features without reading the manual and most importantly, it is written for traders. It just works and efficiently solves a lot of the problems encountered by the serious trader. That said, it shows its age in a number of areas so when Worden a long time ago invited me to a "Blocks" (as Stockfinder was called at the time) seminar, I was very exited. A modern version of TeleChart - exactly what I had been waiting for.

As it turned out, the seminar was not run by Worden, but by another company selling training courses. There was a Gentleman from Worden present who seemed to know a lot about Blocks, but they didn't allow him to say much so I wasted a good part of my Saturday. Anyway, the Worden staff kindly arranged a trial of Blocks for me and I quickly realized that Blocks was not a replacement for TeleChart.

Fast forward to present time when I decided to give StockFinder 5 Beta a chance thinking that they must have sorted it out pretty good by now (sadly, I’m not sure they have). Below you will find some of my notes from a brief evaluation.

To my surprise, including and updating existing TeleChart functionality has not been an objective for the StockFinder team although it is clear that the functionality is close enough that you could be forgiven for thinking that StockFinder was intended to replace TeleChart.

A trivial example of TeleChart functionality mysteriously left out is watchlist flags. This functionality is really easy to implement so Worden must have consciously decided not to provide this useful feature. A major mistake in my estimate. Another very useful function is the TeleChart Custom Date Sort where, after selecting two dates on the Chart, Telechart tells you the price percent change and sort your watchlist according to the date range selected. Again, trivial to implement.

StockFinder has many promising new features and a couple of dubious ones. Although they changed the name of the application from Blocks to StockFinder, I assume that "Block Diagrams" is intended to be a key feature. Rather than type "Price.Close > 50" you draw 10 boxes (blocks?) and connect them with arrows? At the moment, I fail to see the value of these Block Diagrams and wish they had spend the money elsewhere.

We got broker integration. Cute, but the functionality is barely sufficient for even simple transactions and do you really trust StockFinder to sit between you and your broker? I assume the brokers paid for the development, but I think Worden’s focus should have been on getting the basic StockFinder functionality right before adding this type of feature.

We got a BackScanner which is very useful assuming it works. I tried an old example provided by Worden but my result came out different compared to Worden's own result (same setup, but different blocks/Stockfinder version) which dropped my confidence a bit. Also, it wasn’t immediately obvious how you set the options, e.g., commissions, position size etc. and I couldn’t find any documentation on the BackScanner in the StockFinder 5 User Guide”. I didn't investigate further as I already have professional tools for backtesting.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we got RealCode.

Despite the latter features, it feels like StockFinder, compared to TeleChart, has shifted the emphasis from being a traders tool that provides essential features and inspires trust in the results to a user interface extravaganza that really rises your expectations but doesn't deliver by providing the basic features you really need and making sure they are efficient and rock solid.

Alright, time to try a few simple things.

When StockFinder starts, it unconditionally performs a program update. This is both great and not so great. The problem is that sooner or later you will wake up one morning and the StockFinder that worked fine on your computer the night before no longer works and there is no way you can revert to the previous version. Or maybe Worden breaks something that is essential to your trading, but Worden considers low priority to get fixed.

Immediately after starting StockFinder, I noticed that a full line at the bottom of the window contains nothing but a font size selector. I need all the screen real-estate I can get so that is not something I like to see.

First, I decided to add a closing price column to the watchlist and clicked the "+" button. You see a list of columns and indicators, but there is no closing price. However, there is a "High", "low" and "Last" column and a "Price" indicator. If you select the "Price" indicator it appears as a column, but oddly it is no longer called "Price", but "Price history". I am looking at these numbers after hours and "Last" and "Price history" both display the closing price. There is a big difference between “Price” and “Closing Price”, so I am not sure how this is supposed to work with delayed or real-time data.

If you run the EOD StockFinder during trading hours, the "Data Status" claims the data was last updated during trading hours so I expected to see delayed or BATS prices, but “Last” is showing the closing price from the previous day which is wrong. The charts are not updated either so this must be a bug.

Looking for the closing price, I encountered a general and significant problem. Whenever you try to add a column, indicator or use some other built-in function there is no definition available - at least none that I can find. Surely, in version 5, there must be a description of each indicator and a definition of each parameter accessible with a simple click?

Next, I created a simple condition on the chart, right-clicked it and selected "Scan". This worked fine, but when I clicked on another column to re-sort by a different criteria, StockFinder removed the scan I had just added. I assume this is a bug as it is obviously not what I wanted.

Another (trivial) problem is that if you create a condition which is, say, an average of volume, when you come back to edit said condition, there is no clue as to what it is an average off (unless you changed the generated condition name to record this fact).

If you accidentally click “New Combo Condition”, there is no way to cancel your action. The “Edit Combination Condition” dialog box (notice the inconsistent naming) does not a have a cancel button.

Although conditions has a "Scan" function, I suspect this is not the intended way to write scans as it is not only tedious, but has some issues in terms of reusing the scan in another context. There is indeed another way, click on the "Filter box above the watchlist and select "Create New Filter". Note that we are no longer scanning (highlighting wanted items), but filtering (removing unwanted items) so this may not be what you want, but a similar feature is not available for scanning. If you are a TeleChart user, remember that scanning is called filtering in StockFinder.

Lets say you want a condition that is true when ADX DI+ is above ADX DI-. You click "Add Condition to filter" and pick "DI ADX" and then what? It is not obvious if it is possible to go any further along this route. There is no help text or definition of these indicators and their components appear not be labeled according to typical trading conventions. Then you decide to take a different approach and create a chart with ADX, DI- and DI+. It should now be a simple matter of dragging the DI+ line to the DI- line and selecting "Create Condition" from the Pop-up menu. This however does not work as it compares ADX to DI- (must be a bug). Then you try the other way around and drag DI- to DI+. I think this works as it compares something called "NegDI" to "+DI" (notice the inconsistent naming), but it looks like DI+ and DI- are calculated incorrectly. Also, the automatically generated condition name is wrong. Also note that the parameters you can tweak are different for ADX on the chart and ADX in the condition - they should obviously be the same.

Assuming the condition does what you expect, you can now select "Edit Filter" and drag the condition onto the filter. Oh wait, you can't because the condition is local to the chart and the filter is global. There is no way to get your new condition into the filter. What you can do though, is save the condition. Technically, it now becomes a different condition with global scope and loses the context that was previously provided by the chart, e.g., bar duration. You will have to convert the condition name into something that is acceptable as a file name which is a little tedious as I had used some characters in the name that are not allowed in file names. I couldn't figure out how to edit a previously saved condition short of overwriting it with a modified version. Even this is a little difficult as the customary file dialog box is not available when saving conditions so you have to remember the file name you used or look it up outside of StockFinder.

Although filters and saved conditions exist as files, there is no way to organize them into hierarchies and they are not stored as code in text format so you can't edit them directly.

So what do you do if you need to edit this newly saved condition? Well, you can edit it if you click on the condition from within the filter dialog. Interestingly, although you probably thought you were editing the condition you recently saved, the act of editing it created a third version that only exists within this particular filter.

Clearly, Worden is having trouble defining how the basic elements of the application should work and interact, e.g., whether  scans, filters, conditions, drawings etc. are global or local to a chart or layout, how they should be organized/defined and how they can be combined. I was also a little concerned about the multitude of "Update interval" settings available in most dialog boxes. Although I understand the problem they are trying to solve, I suspect that the present approach will become unmanageable so this is probably another area that require more thought.

The contents of the edit filter dialog is a little garbled because the dialog box is too small. You can enlarge it, but next time you open it, it is back to its original size.

The filter dialog allows you to re-arrange the order of the conditions. However, clicking the little up and down arrows caused a "this is embarrassing" error message. By the way, please make the count of items that passes each condition a proper column and not mangled with the condition name.

The filter has a "Run every" option which makes sense, but what is the difference between "Run once" and "Manual"? Interestingly, when you add a condition, the condition itself has an update frequency which makes no sense as all the conditions within a filter are evaluated as a unit.

I finally ran the filter resulting in an empty watch list, but the status line stating "11 Items in WatchList". However, the list was instantaneously (the filter was not re-calculated) populated when I clicked "re-filter".

Needless to say that my filter didn't produce the result I was expecting so I had to try and figure out where the problem was. You would expect a checkbox to temporarily disable a condition without having to remove it but no such luck. I started over and created a number of  simple one-condition filters. Running each filter on the SP-500, all results were close or similar to the result I got in Tradestation. Once I started combining conditions to recreate my original filter I got (almost) the same result as in Tradestation (difference likely due to rounding errors in the StockFinder ADX function and/or differences in the quote feeds).

So now that you have spent a lot of effort creating your filter, you may decide that you rather use it as a scan instead of a filter. Although this is an obvious thing to do and would require no change to the filter/scan criteria I don’t see any way to do this.

It is common to replace the Microsoft Internet explorer browser with Firefox or Chrome as the default browser, but if you click on a link that opens an external browser, StockFinder opens the link in Internet Explorer not your default browser. Also, some of Wordens web pages now uses non-standard Internet Explorer add-ons. Poor style.

When you select "File->Exit", StockFinder closes the layout, but doesn't shutdown. Clicking the "Close" button in the top right corner of the window doesn't work either so I have to kill it in the Task Manager. However, if I click "Close" without clicking Exit first, Stockfinder saves the layout (without asking) and exits cleanly.

In conclusion, StockFinder could be a great product and although it is usable and useful, it appears to a have a little too many bugs and some basic features are either missing or not conceptually solid which is a little disconcerting given we are talking about version 5.

Kuf, Thank you for taking time to read and respond to my comments – much appreciated!

I admittedly didn’t discover the watchlist/flag column, but it is an excellent idea to make it a column and link it with another watchlist.

TeleChart users review hundreds of items using the space key and I think most will expect flagging to be on a hot key (not double click). I realize this is not straightforward to provide as a user defined short-cut especially as we can have multiple watchlist columns (which is very cool).

I clicked on the flags several times before I realized I had to double click. I assume you want to reserve single click for selecting the item, but I don’t like double clicking :-)

Bug: when you have a “Jump” item in the Main watchlist and double click on a flag, the flag being toggled is the one below the flag you clicked on.

Kuf> “Last and Close are interchangeable”.

"This is of cause a valid definition, but in my experience, “Last” normally refers to the last recorded trade which is often different from the close. By the way, “Close” is only available in RealCode not from the column selector which is fine if it is equivalent to “Last”, but I think most traders will be looking for the name “Close”.