| With the release of eSignal 7.8, we’ve taken a significant step forward in the European markets. You can now get European-focused news and depth to round out your decision support tools in eSignal. And, we’ve also added a few new software features and improved many of the existing features.
More European Market Depth
Even more than in the United States, depth on the European equity markets is very important to traders. We’ve now added depth for the LSE and Euronext to our Market Depth window. The window works the same as it always has but now includes a deeper look into these European markets. (See Figures 1 and 2 for a look at the new depth content.) In 2005, we’ll continue along this path by adding depth for additional exchanges, such as Milan, Helsinki and Stockholm.
In addition to the new depth content, we’ve now added the OFEX (a market for the very newest U.K. companies that include a couple of hundred under-researched and fast-growing companies) and the Bern Stock Exchange, which is available through the Swiss Stock Exchange.
Figure 1: LSE Market Depth
Figure 2: Euronext Market Depth
More International News
While the news offering from eSignal has been primarily centered in the U.S. markets, the 7.8 release brings a new set of key news services to assist the European trader. We start with CNF (Consolidated News Feed), which was formerly RNS (Regulatory News Service) and provides all regulatory company announcements from U.K. companies. Next is Dow Jones Financial Wire, the international equivalent of Dow Jones Newswire that specializes in news on European, Middle Eastern and African companies and the economy.
AFX news has already been available within eSignal, but we’ve now made an enhancement to our news servers to improve the usability of AFX and the 2 new services we are offering from AFX as of 7.8.
As with the domestic symbols, we’ve now mapped the European symbols to the different news services. This allows you to get a News Headline Count for all symbols that are referenced in a news headline and not just for the U.S. and Canadian symbols. This, coupled with the new News Manager, makes these new news services a fantastic tool for researching the European markets.
Figure 3: European Quote Window with Headline Counts
Figure 4: Dow Jones News Wire in the New News Manager
NYSE-and AMEX-Listed Bonds
On the U.S. front, we’ve added listed bonds from the NYSE and AMEX. These are treated as a separate service although there is no additional fee other than the standard exchange fee for the equities. If you wish to follow these instruments, please go to Account Maintenance to add them. You can access Account Maintenance by clicking on the Customer Support menu in the eSignal application, or you can find it in the Support section of eSignal Central.
News Manager Enhancements
The 7.8 release focused on European content, but we also took time to clean out some reported bugs and enhance a few things based on user feedback. The first of these enhancements was to the new News Manager. This integrated window works great to give you filtered headlines based on symbol, service and keyword but hasn’t allowed you to look at all available headlines for the day until now. We’ve added a setting that lets you pick between 1 and 24 hours of headlines when not using a filter. The default is set to 1 hour but can be changed in the News Manager Options.
There’s nothing wrong with increasing to a higher number of hours, but more resources are needed as you go up. It’s best to set it only to the number of hours that gives you the headlines you need without bringing in more than is necessary for your purpose. You can always do a filtered search when looking for something specific.
Other 7.8 Improvements
We’ve also increased the number of link colors from 6 to 12 for the ever-increasing number of users who are setting up many groups on multiple monitors. This works well with the improvements we’ve made to popped-out windows. With this improvement, we’ve now made it possible to set the default of any eSignal window to be popped out and in any position on a different monitor.
We’ve made a lot of big strides with eSignal in 2004 and have a firm handle on the direction we want to go in this coming year. As Europe becomes a higher priority in our software development, we’ll continue to bring you more depth, news and other appropriate content. |
