Thanks for continuing to respond. You don't really need to burn in all of your
friend's disk for collecting quotes. I'm getting along with just a small
section of a disk so far.
The stocks are sent out about three times a day, and I'm really only
interested in those that are sent from 5PM to 9PM (MST) local time.....
This would be the last transmission/closing quotes from xpress.... All
other times, I just nuke the stock_data file every hour on the hour.
If you were to capture (not delete) between 8 and 9 PM EST , and then
be able to do a unique sort on the resulting file, then the data would
amount to about about 140K if you gzip it.
Here's the schedule:
# Subject: Attention XChange Users!
#
# Effective Thursday, January 12, Ingenius will begin transmitting 8869 stock
# symbols on a three times per day basis. The schedule will be:
#
# * Opening Quote - 10:30 am EST and again every 15 minutes for one hour
#
# * Mid-day Quote - 2:00 pm EST and again every 15 minutes for one hour
#
# * Closing Quote - 8:00 pm EST and again every 15 minutes for one hour
#
# Please note that the fifteen minute delayed continuous stock feed, which was
# a part of the Executive Service, will stop on January 9, at 9:00 am EST.
#
# A complete list of the 8869 symbols is available for download to your computer
# in tab-delimited ASCII format. Select the appropriate MAC or DOS file
# in Software Download.
#
If you have a unix flavored box, I could send you my crontab entries for
deleting the file when necessary and capturing it as needed.... This might
need a little tweaking for your configuration, but I'm more than willing
to share what I have for plotting the results too.
So far, you're the only respondent who has offered to back me up, but I wonder
how many are really using what is available. I'm going to copy the mailing
list on this response, and am more than willing to share what I have so far
for processing the resultant data ( plotting results ), but my last inquiry as
to a more common format of the stock data netted zero.
I've had very good results getting gnuplot to work with my equipment, and it
does a pretty good job producing volume/price plots.
Regards,
Richard
According to Bill Fenner:
> In message <199509181807.LAA09129@valet.phx.mcd.mot.com> you write:
> >Once again, I find myself in need of assistance in insuring that the daily
> >closing quotes and volumes are captured while my system is down. If anybody
> >can help with this, I'd certainly appreciate it.
> I turned on "xpress -s" last night. I just checked, and stock_data is 12
> megabytes. Is this the expected daily size?
> (At this daily size, I have space for about a month of data before having to
> compress it... but my roommate might get a little upset since it's *his* new
> gig disk =)
> Bill
-- Richard Schaal Motorola Penal Colony: Inmate 5017 M/S AZ43 DW220 2900 South Diablo Way, Tempe, AZ 85252 Voice: (602)438-3519 Fax: (602)438-6154 E-Mail: rschaal@phx.mcd.mot.com "The result of that calculation is undefined, but it isn't very big."