Site News
Free weekly symbols -- Mon, Nov 17 2008
The new look
new site look
We've talked with subscribers and usability experts over the past month, and have incorporated their suggestions to come up with a new look for the site. It's not complete yet, but here's a sneak preview.
Do you like it? Hate it? Leave a comment!
site downtime
pkfinance.info will be unavailable for about 15 minutes between 10am and 12pm tomorrow (April 16, 2008).
stock data for today
The KSE site has been unreachable for most of today. As such, we've been unable to update today's stock data. We're looking into solutions for this problem.
portfolio trials
Subscribers can try out the portfolio paid features for two weeks. Simply login, and click on the trial link.
special rate for portfolio users
Subscribers who are interested in just the portfolio features can now pay a lower rate to get the same tools as paying subscribers. For Rs 200/month (or Rs 1,200/year), portfolio users will be able to
- add virtually unlimited portfolio entries
- receive daily portfolio emails, instead of weekly
- view portfolio charts
and use most portfolio features that become available to paying subscribers. For more details, view our subscription details page.
stock high-low price spread, shareholding data
Paying subscribers can now view daily and average stock price high-low spreads on the symbol history page. This feature is useful mainly to day traders.
Shareholding statistics for over two hundred companies have been updated with their FY 2006 and 2007 data. If you'd like to see the statistics for your favorite stock picks, contact us, and we'll try to bump them to a higher place in the queue.
intraday charts
The technical charts application can now be used to view KSE intraday trade data. The feed updates once a minute, and the charting tool updates automatically during trading hours. Here's how you can access these charts:
- during business hours, login to the site,
- enter a symbol at the top-right of any page, or on the stock summary page,
- click on the technical charts link,
- when the charts applet starts up, click on the drop-down box that says "Daily" and change that to "1 minute".
The charting tool requires Java 1.4 or higher; you can download Java 6 by clicking on the link at http://java.com/en/download/index.jsp. It is a small download (roughly 7MB for Windows XP/2000). Macintosh users may need to upgrade to OS X 10.4 for Java 1.4. Linux users can either download Java 6 from the above site, or (recommended) use their distribution's package tools to install it.
As always, if you have any questions or comments about this feature, let us know! If you are not a paying subscriber, but are interested in previewing our features, simply login to the site as a free subscriber, and request a trial.
circuit breakers, and even more presets
Added over the course of this month:
- a preset screener for companies that have hit their 52 week highs on consecutive days,
- preset screeners for companies that have exceeded their three month, six month, and one year average volumes in the last trading session,
- daily KSE circuit breakers data
Coming soon for our paying subscribers: company meetings and meeting announcements data in a tabular format, more screener criteria, industry-based company performance comparisons, and more. Want to see your favorite tool on the site? Let us know!
more presets
Based on subscriber feedback, we've added three more preset screeners: sort today's traded companies by the percentage of their close prices against their intraday highs, and display companies that have crossed their 14-day moving averages and 200-day moving averages. The latter two are available to paying subscribers only.
Coming soon: display companies that have exceeded or hit their 52-week highs on consecutive days.
site updates
For our paying subscribers, we've begun adding company quarterly data derived from announcements. We're adding the results sector-by-sector, and will have at least four or five quarters worth of information (where possible) on the site within a month or so. The data is available here. Currently updated: the close-end mutual funds, modarabas, and commercial banks sectors.
We've also added a page to the site that lists all the updates made to the various sections (news and announcements, nav, book closure dates and spot/xd/xb dates, quarterly results, etc.). This is linked to the footer of every page on this site. There will be an Atom feed for the updates later this week.
stock lookup error
I just found out that the stock lookup pages didn't work for many subscribers this weekend. It turned out to be an error introduced late Friday night. The problem has been fixed now, and we apologize for the lack of access.
To compensate our valued users for the inconvenience, we're extending the trial for two more days. It will now end on Feb 2, not Jan 31.
news alerts
In addition to the price and volume-related stock alerts, you can now set news alerts for stocks you are interested in. If there are any news items in the local media or announcements made by the company, you'll find a copy of them in your email.
This is a paid feature, but free for all subscribers until the end of January. Not a subscriber? Sign up for free today!
edit, averaged cost
A few subscribers have asked for some sort of edit or update functionality for the portfolio entries. I've been putting off adding an edit button because I wanted to redo the portfolio page as a trade log, which I know several subscribers are interested in.
Since it's taking me a while to properly design the trade log feature, I've gone ahead and added the edit button to the portfolio page. If you run into any problems with it, please let me know.
Based on another request, I've added a "cost price" column to the portfolio summary page. This is the averaged cost of the share buy prices — it's useful if you've bought multiple amounts of the same shares at different rates.
free access to premium features
Signed into the site before January 2007? Well, you now have access to all the paid features until the end of the month!
52 week comparison
A subscriber asked for this, and it took a few minutes to add. You can now feed in a bunch of symbols on the screener page, and it will return a table with the last closing prices for the symbols, their 52 week highs and lows, and percentages of the closing prices against the 52 week markers.
It's a “convenience” feature — all the information it provides is available elsewhere on the site, but having it in one table cuts down on the amount of work you have to do. If you'd like to see similar aggregated collections of data, let us know! We're here to serve you, after all.
You will need to be logged in to use the feature; if you don't have an account, sign up for free.
oops!
A few subscribers received alerts during the past three days (Wednesday to today) which were triggered incorrectly. The offending code has been fixed.
The management apologizes for any inconvenience they may have caused.
updates
I hope you all are doing well. The weather is finally nice here in Lahore; a pity it's hot nine months out of twelve.
I have had a couple of meetings with my co-workers, and we've discussed ideas for what to add to the site. One thing they're going through is company information -- lists of company directors, executives, company office locations, things like that. I wrote some code for them, and they're doing data entry on that; the feature should be available on the site before the end of the year.
Another thing is more fundamentals data -- we have access to quarterly results for several years, but they're in a format that needs to be converted for the web site. It shouldn't take long to do the conversion, though it will take a short while to cross-check the data with paper records, and ensure its accuracy. After it's added to the database, we'll be able to calculate expected earnings, PEG ratios, and much more.
The CFS subsection of the site is almost ready -- that might be available within a week or two.
Screener changes
The screener has two more selection criteria: percentage of the symbol's highest close ever, and percentage of the highest close within the past 52 weeks. The latter, of course, is only useful for symbols that have traded in the past 52 weeks.
Want to see more items in the screener selection form? Tell us, and we'll try to work something out.
It's been over a month...
It's been way too long since my last update. Here's some of the things we've added to the site over the past month or so:
- portfolio charts — investment, current portfolio value, and gain/loss over time, with or without comparisons against the KSE-100 index (paid users only)
- email a company's details — recent stock performance, last annual report's figures, recent company news — everything we show on the symbol summary page
- more derived data for the company fundamentals display (paid users only)
- one-click update of changed/delisted symbols on the portfolio and alert pages
- more technical screeners, including recent trades sorted by sector
- quick links for company fundamentals, sorted by EPS, ROE, P/E, P/BV (paid users only)
- interactive technical charts with over 50 technical indicators, buy/sell signals, and user-configurable parameters (paid users only)
- portfolio emails in text and csv format
- listed the various subscription packages as e-products on 2co
- pivot calculations, for rough indications of support/resistance levels (paid users only)
- calender selection for date fields
Curious about the interactive charts? Here's a screenshot of them in action (click for a larger image): 
What's next? We're massaging some collected fundamentals data of quarterly announcements from 1997 onwards. It'll show up on the fundamentals page soon. We're also performing some backend optimization — automating the news subsite, for example. Most importantly, we're working to get a live KSE feed, for intraday charts and a stock ticker.
Several of the features I've listed up above were actually suggestions made by subscribers. If you'd like to see something on the site, let us know! We're more likely than not to add tools for our subscribers, and you don't have to be a paying subscriber for us to listen to you.
Hopefully my next update will be in less than a month's time...
Subscription information
Basis is up
Search announcements
Paying users can now search announcements by date.
Searching for something?
Paying users can now search for news items and board meetings by providing a symbol, date range, or category (in the case of news). I'll have the meeting announcement search enabled in a day or so, plus integration of the announcements with the symbol detail display page.
As promised below.
Paying users can now download the results of their screener searches in CSV file format. They can also now automate their saved searches — the searches will be run daily and the results emailed to them, ready for import into their spreadsheets.
This feature was actually ready and available yesterday, but the first batch of automated searches were not executed until today afternoon.
A few changes...
Nothing major this week. The portfolio manager page now has a link that lets you download your portfolio in CSV file format, which can then be opened with Microsoft Excel or Open Office, or any other spreadsheet application. The screener will soon have that option as well.
Speaking of the screener, paying subscribers will soon have the ability to automatically run the screener, and have the results emailed to them in CSV format (or HTML, if they prefer).
It's been a while...
Looks like it's been over a month since I updated this page. Here's what's been added to the site lately:
- Company announcements, straight from the stock market feed. It's updated daily.
- Mutual fund Net Asset Values — also updated daily, starting next week.
- SMS alerts and requests — you can query for symbol rates, market statistics, and get your portfolio information, all on your cell phone.
- Several cosmetic changes to the web site. You've probably noticed the change in the color scheme; most people seem to agree with the lighter shades. The symbol lookups now have a proper drop-down menu. There will be a change in the navigation toolbar soon.
- An improved stock screener.
The stock screener lets paid users find symbols by specifying criteria: 
Results:
Searches can be assigned a name, thus saving you the trouble of manually filling out the form.
What's next? More refinement of the web site (it needs to load a lot faster), and more features — automatically running the saved searches, regular/future trading basis calculations, the ability to specify date range fields for symbol information, news, meetings, index stats, and more. Stay tuned.
Not quite there with the results page.
I've uploaded some other code that had been in the pipeline: market momentum indicators. On the market analysis page, you can now find a larger KSE-100 closing rate chart and several advance-decline indicators (you need to login to view them). This feature will be worked on and improved over the next few days, after the board meeting results code goes live.
As always, if you'd like to see something on the site, we'd love to hear from you.
Recent updates to the site
It's been a few busy days here at pkfinance central. We've moved the office to a larger location, and spent most of the past couple of days fixing it up (installing light fixtures, getting the air conditioning to work properly, getting the phone lines transfered over, etc). The development servers and desktop computers will be unpacked tomorrow morning, and I'll be able to work on some sorely needed updates to the site.
Email alerts are now live. They were supposed to be ready on the 29th, but there was a problem with some of the code that wasn't noticed until earlier today. We're also gearing up for SMS alerts, and are working with the SMS gateway people on a couple of issues.
Something a few users might have noticed is that the site now tries to correct misspelled symbol names. Last week, I noticed a user had searched for ogdcl when they wanted ogdc, and whipped up some code to handle that. It's not perfect, but it'll help most people find what they were looking for.
Probably the next new feature to show up later this week will be a results page for board meetings — a description of meeting announcements, linked with the entry for the actual meeting itself. Stay tuned.
Moving averages, and more!
Most of the work mentioned in the previous news entry went live on the 12th of May. The stock detail page has been split up into four pages, and the moving averages and symbol comparison charts have been added. You need to sign in to view the technical charts.
This week, we're working on the remainder of the tasks (the news and meetings page layouts, market analysis tools), and also on improving the news feature. In addition, we're adding moving averages to our alerts feature; if a symbol you're interested in crosses its 14-day moving average, you'll get an alert.
News for April 30 - May 1, 2006
Most of the work this week has been in improving the site infrastructure, and not on user-visible changes. The major new feature added this week has been the display of 14-day and 200-day moving averages on the stock detail display page. Example: ogdc w/ 14d and 200d. Users who have portfolios set up will, as of this week, receive email detailing their market position (original investment, current value of their investment, and gain/loss).
Upcoming features: more market and stock analysis tools (MACD, compare two symbols with each other, index ratios). The stock detail page will be split into different sections — a summary page, a page for technical data and tools, one for fundamentals, symbol history, and more. We also plan to redo the layout of the news and meetings pages, and add more search functionality.
As always, if you'd like to see something on the site, let us know!