On the topic of InteractiveBrokers, I do have a
bittersweet relationship with them.
Advantages:
* Open documented API available to all traders
* Lowest cost per trade anywhere
* Trade large variety of instruments and markets
Disadvantages:
* Their web-site remains a disaster
* Their various security options like 2-factor
authentication are a pain in the rear
* A bloated "gateway" program is required to run
on the machine you wish to trade from
So for web-trading only, Ameritrade, E*TRADE, and Schwab are good.
But for rolling your own, particularly in Excel,
InteractiveBrokers probably wins. If you wish to
go this route, plan on sighted assistance to
navigate the account opening process. After
that, most things can be done from within Excel,
python, java, c, etc. But I do still dread
whenever I have to interact with their java-happy web-site.
Ben
At 10:02 AM 2/28/2017, you wrote:
Hi,
To add to this if you do want to go your own way I'd suggest looking at
Python as there are modules out there. For example, I like getting data from
Quandl and they have a module for Python. And that loads into pandas which
is essentially Excel on steroids via code. In fact it can be interesting
just to use it from the interpreter command line like to manipulate the
pandas DataFrame.
Some info from Quandl is free, but not all. Its pricing is not for tiny
retail trader like me but still worth looking at their free data.
(They have APIs in other languages as well. I'd think Rick may find it of
interest.)
As for web interfaces, I agree with Ben, I am a bit surprised Ben uses
Interactive Brokers, the last time I looked there that site was a disaster
but perhaps it changed. As they do often.
I have found OptionsXpress to be tolerable for making trades. Fidelity's
website is technically accessible, but perhaps because I just don't
understand what it is trying to do, but it seems complicated and doesnt
always work the way I am expecting. It does have research tools, not all of
which are charts, so maybe with some patience...
As an example of an update gone wrong, recently Wells Fargo Brokerage
updated their site. They tried to make it accessible, it even has ARIA all
over. The problem is it would appear they did not necessarily know what they
were doing. And when that happens, ARIA can break more things than it fixes
when it is applied incorrectly. Which is a bit where they are at. These are
U.S. options, I can't speak to what is available elsewhere.
And as for stand alone applications, I have never found one that is
accessible. Power traders use these ore, especialy options and futures
traders. I find it disappointing, but not surprising. Bottom line the
markets are chart driven for 99% of traders and charts are just not an
accessible beast by nature.
Travis
-----Original Message-----
From: program-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:program-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Ben Humphreys
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2017 7:48 AM
To: program-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [program-l] Re: OT - stock market analysis
Hi Gabe,
Several years ago, I looked at many of the popular desktop trading platforms
from an acccessibility standpoint and found them all lacking.
Several reasons for this:
* The "chart" is at the center of their user-interface
* eye-catching user-interfaces that look visually interesting are seldom
accessible
* The toolkits used to build most of them are themselves lacking
accessibility
the one partial exception to this was Ninja Trader. Because it is based on
.NET, and that toolkit from Microsoft tends to be the most accessible, I
found Ninja Trader was accessible but not particularly usable.
Trading via the web was better. For example, I know Ameritrade's web
interface to be quite usable. But these brokers have a tendency to swap out
an interface on Friday, and you can easily find the new interface is
unusable on Monday. This happened with Schwab earlier this year, but
they've since fixed it.
For mere mortals who don't wish to roll their own like Rick and myself, I
can recommend Excel.
Excel has many add-ons available to pull fundimental information from Yahoo
Finance and others. It can also be hooked up to live trading from
Interactive Brokers and others.
The beauty of Excel is that you can seeand manipulate the raw data instead
of struggling with a chart interface.
I'm also working on a completely command-line interface to Interactive
Brokers which I'll release later this year. You can, for example, buy 100
shares of Apple from the command line like this:
C:\>CLIB BUY 100 AAPL
Bought 100 shares of AAPL with a market order at 136.93
As the market for blind-friendly software is small in general, and even
smaller in an area like investing, finding a group of like-minded visually
impaired investors has been challenging, which is perhaps why there isn't
more out there on this stuff.
Ben
At 11:17 AM 2/27/2017, you wrote:
>Hey Ric,
>That platform sounds something worth while,
>mainly, I am looking for a non-graphical way to
>recieve the same amount of infromation sighted
>people can get quickly from all of the grphs about stocks / companies.
>Something like the synthesis data you are
>talking about would be pretty cool, but I am not
>well versed in fundamental analysis, nor do i
>particularly want to be :) My question is more
>so for suggestions for how you get your
>information in an accessible way, that like you
>said isn't pieceing five different web pages,
>and if there were any software options to 1.
>gather that information in a sort of dashboard,
>mainly, the Implied Volitility, the deltas, and
>thetas, current price, and maybe those numbers for the last year or so.
>2. then to place those trades that I would like to
>Idealy 1 and 2 would be through the same thing,
>but if they are seperate its no big deal, but I
>am just getting myself into the markets and been
>studying and listening to some things, and so
>not wanting to get invested or committed to a
>particular broker or platform and then figure
>out their software, website, etc, is not useable with screen readers.
>-Gabe
>
>On Sat, Feb 25, 2017 at 1:05 PM, Rick Thomas
><<mailto:ofbgmail@xxxxxxxxx>ofbgmail@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Hi Gabe:
>Sabra is not an investor me thinks.
>I have a platform I have built and used for about 15 years now.
>I collect all the financial statements for about 2500 companies I have an
>interest in watching - mostely the non penny stocks and store them in a
>database.
>My platform has many ways of making lists, portfolios, of stocks, sorting
>filtering and comparing them on selected values.
>It also handles preferred stocks and ties them into their parent company
for
>relative analysis of these issues as well.
>There are many diferent ways I have setup to analyze the relative value of
>portfolios of stocks within categories and industries or in several other
>aggrigate dependancy groupings.
>I am currently completely ReWriting the entire platform from scratch and am
>currently performing the use case and IPO analysis based on my current UI
>and a new source of data - Market Watch.
>While the platform does use a database that would allow for distribution of
>the platform, the platform is very very complicated to use and would only
>make sense to a rather experienced investor well founded in fundemental
>analysis.
>Also, it is not set up for others to use so there is little and less
>documentation surrounding the complex feature set and navigation options as
>well as many custom ratios, margins, growth progressions etc...
>Yahoo was my main source of information, along with several other sites I
>aggritated data from, but it has become unusable so I have had to find
>another data source and in the process have decided to do a complete
>ReDesign of the project to simplify, consolidate and generally clean up 15
>years of patchwork additions to the original code base.
>It uses multi-core parallel processing and a generic database methodology
>over a SQL Server CE Database so the code base is not something I would
wish
>on my worst enemy - thus another good reason for the Rewrite.
>I don't think Sabras idea would help at all.
>I know what you are asking and what you are going through trying to compare
>and contrast companies online - it just isnt possible in any depth even
with
>those sloppy and usually inaccurate sites that offer automagic selection
and
>comparison based on properties you enter on their sites.
>Even if you get a list you will take weeks, years, to try and compare them
>by many detail line items like revenue, PretaxIncome, DebtToRevenue and
>projectiions like expected return this year, next year and all the normal
>ratios, growth rates, including BalanceSheet metrix growth rates and
quickly
>view say 8 or 10 quarters of infoinformation for each company in the list
by
>just arrowing up and down the list of companies with all those details in a
>textbox just below the ticker list instead of having to click on one link
at
>a time, find the data and then back paging to the selection page, finding
>where you left off and so on and so on not to mention you need to look at 3
>web pages for every company ie balance sheet, income statement and cash
flow
>statement along with the profile and other pages then go back and start all
>over for the next company.
>It just isnt possible to say pull down 500 companies, filter out the ones
>with the worst metrix, then sort the rest on say 100 to 200 metrix
filtering
>out those you think don't make the cut for what you are looking for until
>you get down to the 10 best.
>Then go through each line item of interest, you can specify as many
quarters
>or years as you are interested in, match the details of interest and pick
>perhaps the best 5 for watching for them to go on sale or make a bid on.
>No, I found using the internet websites perhaps better than just watching
>the entertainment on CNBCÂ Â but these days I get my information from
Yahoos
>list of business news providers and watching Bloomberg TV and Radio.
>There is just no simple way to make a buck investing in my opinion, mostely
>it is a matter of luck unless you spend enough time at it to compete with
>the pros and have the tools to give you an edge over most of the individual
>investors out there.
>The pros use Bloomberg Terminals which are the Gold Standard and the latest
>Automated investment platforms are using very, very advanced software to
>automatically pick stocks.
>I don't try and beat them, just make a buck and not lose money since I play
>with my retirement account and avoid any speculation whenever possible.
>I am currently fully in cash, missed the entire Trump Rally, but have been
>leaning twoard fixed income investing and will likely be laddering into
>positions as the rates move up over the next year or 3.
>If there is a 10 percent pullback I might look at some stocks I have on my
>shopping list but they are all to expensive just now so I am waiting for
>them to go on sale.
>What exactly are you asking?
>Are you a programmer or are you asking about some way to pick stocks or are
>you looking for some software to use to help you and is this for gambling,
>speculation, or for retirement investments?
>Rick USA
>
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