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Joined: 11/30/2007
Posts: 17
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This is also posted in the suggestions forum, but I thought it might get a bit more viewer hits here (so far, 0 over there), to get feedback...
One of the areas I find in great need of improvement is the handling and management of watchlists. It appears that the same software algorithms have carried over to Blocks, as well, so I hope that others share my feelings and will add to my observations. (I do like the feature that TC watchlists show up in Blocks with no effort).
First and foremost, I feel that watchlist management needs to be hierarchical rather than the flat system currently employed. Everyone knows what this is: the windows explorer is just that. Thus, you should be able to group watchlists within categories: December 07, My tests, etc. etc. This, you could start with just a list of the watchlist groups, (rather than all of the items in all of the groups being visible all of the time).
If you want to move a list from one to another: drag and drop; or when you are done with a group, delete the "folder" containing that group. (Deleting a bunch of old watchlists is really painful). And so on.
The other thing about hierarchical organization is that one can drill down rather quickly rather than having to hunt through a flat list. This is also helpful since there are, for example, on my installation, numerous system lists which have no entries, and others I'm just plain not interested in, but in a flat system they're there and I have to wade through them.
Also, I don't understand the technical reason why a stock cannot be removed from a list generated by an easy scan. Even if there is a valid reason, it should not continue to be true if I flag stocks from an easy scan-generated list and copy them to another (or a new) watchlist.
Well, there's more...I guess I use watchlists a lot, and find it really wanting a lot of sprucing up.
Watchlists should have an option wherein all the UNflagged items can be removed. If I flag a whole bunch of stocks as worth watching, I shouldn't have to copy them to yet another watchlist in order to get rid of the ones I DON'T want to watch.
Also, one should be able to cursor up and down in a watchlist. I should be able to use the up arrow to move back up the list if I choose; and in addition to the space bar, I should be able to use the down-arrow key to move down a list (and, in my opinion, page-up and page-down).
In addition, since at the watchlist level the type-and-filter option works, it should work for the stocks within a watchlist, rather than having to "jump" to get to a specific stock.
If I type in a part of a name at either the watchlist top-level or within a watchlist, while I do like the "filter" option, I should be able to down-arrow into the filter list to select the watchlist (or stock) I want to select. (In compliance with windows and mac standards).
While I'm in the arena, there is another thing which I would like to see changed: you cannot set some parameter to see only stocks with notes in a specified date range. Frankly, I'm not interested (99 44/100 of the time) in notes that are several years old. I would like to say "show me stocks with notes from the last 30 days, or last 10 days or ..."
I'm sure there are scraps of paper floating around my office with more things I'd like to see done to the watchlist portion of the software, (I have quite a bit written down on the other sections, but they'll have to wait until another day) and I'm sure many others have their own insights. Since this entire mechanism is currently being carried forward into Blocks, as I mentioned, I would like to see (if others agree with me) a strong lobby to improve this vital part of a great pair of products.
Cheers
John
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