WATCHING AND BUYING STOCKS BY COMPUTER
(FORTUNE Magazine) – Keeping track of your investments can take a pile of paperwork. How long ago did you sell that Kodak stock? If you take your profit on Pactel, what's the annualized return? Personal computers can help with all this and more. ''The private investor can now truly afford to monitor and manage his own portfolio,'' says Don Cochran, marketing director of Wall Street Software, a firm in Eugene, Oregon, that publishes a catalogue of selected software programs. Hundreds of handy programs sell from $40 to $300. Most are designed for IBM and compatible PCs, though more are appearing for the Macintosh. ''What's really exciting,'' says Cochran, ''is how cheap market information is getting.'' For pennies a quote, investors with telephone modems can get on- line updates of stock prices from such services as H&R Block's CompuServe, Dow Jones News/Retrieval, and Warner Computer Systems. The smartest programs get quotes automatically, then compare them with historical price trends and print out the results as graphs. Some even sound an alarm when prices hit levels that you have set in advance. Jackson Parks of San Francisco, a former airline reservations supervisor, has done so well trading stocks with his PC that he was able to take early retirement. You can begin with a relatively simple program that tracks portfolio performance and makes buy recommendations. One of the best values is Quant IX, which you can order only from Quant IX Software of Milwaukee for $89, plus whatever database fees you incur. It works on IBM PCs and compatibles with DOS versions 3.1 or later. Quant IX records transactions, gains and losses, and all necessary tax records. To identify bargains, the program also employs five valuation models. A GOOD STARTER PROGRAM for mutual fund investors is Reality Technologies' WealthBuilder by Money Magazine. (Money, like Fortune, is published by Time Inc. Magazine Co.) The program, which costs $250 plus $99 a year for quarterly updates, provides performance data on 1,400 funds as well as sales and other fees. WealthBuilder will soon add similar data for 10,000 stocks and bonds. Using a simple form of artificial intelligence, the program queries you about your investment aims and helps you choose the best mix of funds and the optimum allocation of assets. If you take your signals from the market's technical indicators, you'll like Equis International's MetaStock-Professional, at $295. It includes more than 40 indicators and formulas for analyzing stock movements, such as volume trends and the spreads in trading, and allows you to add your own as well. The phone is the key to the Equalizer system sold by Charles Schwab & Co., the discount brokerage firm. The $269 program, which includes a modem, makes your PC your broker. It gives you access by phone to market data and lets you place your buy and sell orders. You can figure the value of your portfolio daily rather than wait for monthly statements in the mail. ''I would not be in this treacherous market without the Equalizer, but then I trade a lot,'' says Parks, the airline employee-turned-professional investor. Last year he made 220 stock trades through his PC, many of them split-second decisions in order to catch a price that was momentarily high or low. Schwab charges its usual commissions on trades, plus $13 a month and $1.45 a minute for quotes. Parks says he makes up the fees with extra profits. Even if you're old-fashioned enough to use a live broker, you can still rely on the computer to track your portfolio more closely than the brokerage firm will. The best programs, priced between $40 and $150, also help you keep other household financial records. One top seller is Intuit's Quicken, at just $60. More sophisticated, and perhaps best known, is MECA Ventures Inc.'s Managing Your Money by Andrew Tobias. The program, which lists for $220, includes a useful portfolio management chapter. You also can use it to monitor your IRA and Keogh accounts. Wall Street Software's Cochran warns that none of these programs is infallible. But the best of them make it a lot easier to manage your portfolio and your finances, and might even make you a smarter investor. CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: NO CREDIT CAPTION: HELP FOR YOUR PC The top four programs are for IBM machines, while the others also have Macintosh versions. |
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