1. OptionVue contains a new alert system that can send an e-mail, display an on-screen message, post a message in the OptionVue Message Log, and/or make a sound when the price or volume of an asset or option hits a certain level and when existing positions reach objectives or stops. Read complete details below.

2. The management of scheduled events in OptionVue has been raised to a new level. Previously, the program remembered what asset files you wanted to update in only one place. Consequently, if you scheduled the program to update all your asset files at a future time, but before that time arrived you told the program to update just one asset, you had to remember to change the setting back to “update all asset files” when you were finished. Otherwise the program would only update that single asset file when the scheduled time arrived.

Now, when you schedule an event, all the details of that event (including what asset files are to be updated) are sent to the Scheduling Agent, where the event resides independently. Nothing you do after that, such as telling the software to update just one asset, has any effect on the scheduled events, because an event can be modified or deleted only from within the Agent. To open the Agent, click the small red “A” icon in the upper right area of the main form. You may set up and schedule new events from within the Agent or through the menus.

With this approach come some new freedoms. For instance, most types of events may be scheduled any number of times. For example, you may schedule the updating of one batch of asset files at one time and a different batch of asset files at another time. The same goes for price chart files, OpScans, and other tasks. The only two types of events that you may not schedule more than one instance of are the BDB update and the new automatic file backup procedure.

There are ten different types of events that may be scheduled:

Update asset files
Update price chart files
Update open windows
Download fresh BDB if available
Run OpScans
Update asset files with continuous data service
Import data from ASCII file
Export data to ASCII file
Print reports (new)
Back up key files (new)

The first five events listed above make use of NetVue services. If you schedule two or more of these to happen at the same time, the program automatically consolidates them so that they happen in a single session with NetVue. Note that you no longer need to schedule the updating of the Quotes Display. Instead, you may schedule the updating of all open windows, which usually includes the Quotes Display since you usually have it open. It’s the same event that happens when you click the blue “N” in the upper right area of the main window.

Note that the new Scheduling Agent won’t remember events you may have scheduled with a prior version of OptionVue 5, so if you had any events scheduled before, you’ll need to take a few moments and set them up again.

3. As mentioned above, OptionVue 5 has a new feature for batch printing Portfolio Manager Reports. This is accessible through “File | Print Reports” in the main menu. You may select any number of available reports plus any number of available accounts, and when the process runs, it will print the requested reports for all the indicated accounts. You may run this process immediately or schedule it to happen in the future or at regular intervals.

4. Also mentioned above, OptionVue 5 has a new facility for automatically copying, or “backing up”, all of its key files to another location. This is accessible through “File | Back up key files” in the main menu. You may run this process immediately or schedule it to happen at regular intervals. Users should probably give some thought to where they would like to have their files copied. The default is a subfolder named BACKUP off of the OptionVue 5 main folder. The program will automatically create the backup folder, if necessary, and copy all of OptionVue 5’s key files into it, organized into subfolders by the same names as you see in the main OptionVue 5 folder.

You can also specify an alternate destination folder, and the program will copy files into this folder every other time that it performs the backup operation. Specifying an alternate folder is a good idea because sometimes, if a problem develops in one or more of your files, you may not discover it until after the backup process has been run once, and you can be thankful that you have another (previous) copy to draw upon. For this reason it is advisable to schedule the backup no more frequently than once/day. Note that if your computer is networked with one or more other computers, it can be good to specify a folder in the other computer as your backup destination. That way, you can recover files in the event of a hard drive failure.

5. We developed several new technical indicators to be used with Price Charts. In addition to the previously existing Auto-Trend line and Put/Call Volume Ratios, the software now allows you to set up moving averages, Bollinger bands, Acceleration bands (a la Price Headley), hand-placed trend lines, stochastics, RSI, MACD, Momentum, and Momentum divergence (also per Price Headley). Some of these indicators appropriately overlay the price chart itself; others (the non-overlaid indicators) appear in a separate section beneath the price chart. The software is able to show just one overlaid indicator and one non-overlaid indicator at a time, plus any number of hand-drawn trend lines.

With new buttons along the top of the Price Chart window, the user can pop indicators on and off, and change their properties. The first button (to the right of the Target button) is for showing/hiding the currently selected overlaid indicator, the second is for showing/hiding the currently selected non-overlaid indicator, and the third is to open the Indicators Properties dialog.

In the Indicators Properties dialog, you can select one overlaid and one non-overlaid indicator, and change their properties. Only one set of indicator properties is stored for the program, and will apply to all assets (just as the previously existing Put/Call Volume Ratio settings always have). The exception to this is the hand-drawn trend lines, which obviously need to be stored separately for each asset. As before, when you start the program, no indicators are displayed. Once you switch indicators on, however, they are on in every Price Chart you open – until you switch them off.

To start drawing the hand-drawn trend lines, first click to depress the button with the image of a pencil on it. Depress and hold the left click button to start drawing a line. Drag the cursor to another location and release the button where you want to terminate the line. As mentioned, you can draw any number of lines per chart. To delete the most recently created line, press the [Esc] key. Keep pressing [Esc] to delete more of the lines in LIFO order. After you have deleted the final hand-drawn trend line from a chart, the next press of the [Esc] key makes the pencil button go up and you are no longer in line drawing mode. Another way to clear all the hand-drawn trend lines for the current asset is to open the Indicators Properties dialog, check the box “Clear all hand-drawn trend lines”, and click OK.

The addition of technical indicators opens up a whole new area of program development. While we do not intend to transform OptionVue 5 into a full-featured technical analysis program, we do plan on adding more indicators as time goes on. However, we need your feedback in order to help us know which new indicators would be valuable to you. So feel free to drop us a note at feedback@optionvue.com.

6. In TradeFinder, we added four new strategies: butterflies, iron condors, collars, and covered writes on convertible securities.

7. In Portfolio Manager Reports, the Performance Summary and List of Accounts reports have a new radio button for selecting whether to include just the current account or all accounts. This does away with the need to display a popup dialog asking that question when you first open the report. Also, your preference is automatically saved. Also new on the List of Accounts report is a check box for indicating whether you want to include the “All Accounts Combined” section at the bottom of the report.

8. Also in Portfolio Manager, when viewing the Performance Graph, you can now stay in the Reports window and change accounts, seeing the Performance Graph for each one automatically updated to reflect today’s account value without having to open and close the Account Status for each account first.

9. Rather than piling all of your OpScan formulas into one file (opscan.for), the software now stores a separate file for each formula, and gives each file the same name as the formula’s title plus an extension of “.FMA”. This will make it easier to send a copy of a single formula to someone else. The software automatically takes care of the conversion from opscan.for to .fma files when the program sees that there is an opscan.for file and no .fma files in the OpScan folder. After the conversion, you may delete opscan.for. It will never be used again by the program.

10. The format of OpScan report files has been changed from space-formatted text to comma-delimited text. This should make it easier to import OpScan reports directly into Excel and other programs. The OptionVue software can still read and display the old space-formatted files, so previously collected OpScan reports can still be opened.

11. In India, a number of stocks have options trading on them. We have added these stocks to the BDB and, with this release of OptionVue 5, you can access them and work with them. Just as the Australian assets all have a “-A” suffix on their symbols, the Indian assets all have a “-I” suffix on their symbols.

12. There is a new Print-To-File feature for the Matrix, accessible by clicking the Print button in the Matrix and then clicking the “Print To File” checkbox, that writes the contents of the Matrix to a comma-delimited ASCII file (extension .csv), ready for import into Excel and other programs. Although we already had a function (the ASCII Export feature) for sending Matrix parameters out to a file, the new Print-To-File feature only writes the parameters that are currently visible in the Matrix, and includes the Summary Section, which is not included in the ASCII Export.

13. The ASCII Export function has three new parameters available for export: Bid IV, Ask IV and Rho.

14. As much as we try to provide clean historical price files through DataVue, problems sometimes enter in like those experienced during the period from 3/21/03 through 3/26/03, when we collected some bad stock prices from our data source. This leads to your seeing some bad bars in the OptionVue Price Charts. We eventually got our historical files cleaned up, but this does not fix the data you have already collected and stored in your computer. The only way to refresh your charts with DataVue was to delete your files and collect them all over again.

Until now, that is. From now on you can enter a date into a new field entitled “Refresh historical data since”, and the next time you access DataVue for historical prices, the program will request fresh data between the date that you typed in and today’s date on every asset you are updating in that particular batch. At the conclusion of the batch (even if that “batch” consists of only one asset), the field is automatically cleared. This new field is accessible in two places, and it makes no difference which one you use. First, it is available as a new field in the top of the Historical Prices Files Setup dialog. Second, it is available in a dialog that can be opened by clicking a new button on the Price Chart window – the 6th button from the left. In the dialog that opens, the ellipsis button next to the date field can be clicked to bring in the date where you have positioned the wand on the Price Chart. So we recommend that you first position the wand somewhere just prior to the “problem area” on the price chart, then click the new button to open the dialog, click the ellipsis button there, and click OK. If you are updating just the currently open Price Chart, then your final step is probably to click the blue N in the upper right. This causes the program to get fresh prices and update the Price Chart automatically.

15. The Variable Volatility model stores, and normally uses, three days of volatility readings. Since the Variable Volatility model is sensitive to bad prices, and can be thrown off by them, users have sometimes needed to delete the 2nd or 3rd day’s volatility readings in order to get rid of bad numbers and get the model back on track. But now, instead of deleting records you can simply enter a date into a new field on the Model Volatility screen (under the Settings tab) entitled “Don’t use volatility readings prior to”. For example, just typing “T” <enter> fills in today’s date and makes the program use only today’s volatility readings. This also can be useful in a situation where the market has made a big move today, causing volatilities to jump significantly, and you want the models to go with that new, higher volatility level.

There is a global version of this new field available in View | Default Models, under the Volatility button. Enter a date in this field and the program will ignore volatility readings collected prior to that date across all assets.

16. OptionVue has a new facility to display a broadcast notice when you log into NetVue, in case you need to be informed of service difficulties.

17. Double-clicking in the Account Status window to open a Matrix now works even if there is no existing asset file (the program auto-creates one from the BDB).

18. When viewing a Graphic Analysis opened from a Matrix, if you click the Price Chart or Volty Chart button the program opens the chart of the asset represented in the Graphic Analysis now instead of whichever asset is highlighted in the Quotes Display.

19. When preparing to import an ASCII file containing current prices, the File Format button in the ASCII Import dialog leads to a new “import wizard”, styled after the one in Excel. In addition to specifying the order of fields, the wizard also allows you to specify whether the file is formatted in fixed column widths or delimited (it does a pretty good job of guessing this on its own when you first enter the file name), specify the delimiter, etc., and see a preview of how the data in your file is going to be interpreted.

20. OptionVue can now import ASCII and Quicken (.qif) files containing transaction records into the Transaction Log. The new import wizard mentioned above is also used for this. You can specify a date range and only records within this range will be imported. The import wizard will check for duplicate records, and ask if the user wants to replace or skip.

21. Australian stock options in the BDB now come with multipliers filled in from the file provided by the Australian exchange, instead of just a default value of 1000. Also, Australian clients are no longer required to be DataVue subscribers in order to receive historical price information.

22. If Account Status is open when the Quotes Display or any open Matrixes are updated via DataVue, the program has the Account Status automatically refresh itself to pick up prices. Also, Portfolio Delta will now be computed even when there is one or more non-BDB stocks in the portfolio.

23. The trade order interface with OptionsXpress was upgraded to recognize straddles, strangles, covered writes, synthetics, butterflies, and iron condors, and to set up the appropriate kind of order in the OptionsXpress order form.

24. If you have continuous quotes reception suspended when you go into BackTrader mode, when you come out of BackTrader mode the quotes reception will still be suspended. Previously, when you came out of BackTrader, quotes reception would always be restarted.

25. OptionVue now retains hand-entered strikes when jumping back in time using BackTrader. With auto-strike extents set on Large, the program retains all the strikes you have defined. If you use Small or Medium extents, the program can still retain your hand-entered strikes, but only if they fall within a reasonable range of the then-current price of the underlying. This change, which was made at the request of some of our clients, was done somewhat reluctantly because it can cause extra strikes to remain defined that did not exist at times in the past, but hopefully this will not cause problems in most cases.

26. In Price Charts, today’s volume is picked up along with today’s price information. That is, the red bar on the right now has a volume bar to go with it. We leave it to the user to interpret this appropriately during the trading day, as the volume of this incomplete day will be displayed next to those of full trading days.

We’d like to take this opportunity to remind users that there is no point in scheduling the updating of your price chart files prior to 7:00 p.m. CST. Our NetVue servers start updating their history files at 6:00 p.m. and it can take some time to complete the task. When that task is complete, NetVue is ready to serve users with data that includes today’s market action. If you have OptionVue 5 update its price chart files too early, you’ll only get data through the previous day’s close. Potentially even more confusing for users, we see users log in and get historical prices during NetVue’s own procedure, which is likely to result in some of the user’s files being up-to-date and other files being one day behind. So please, updating your price chart files after 7:00 p.m. CST is best.

27. For the BullSignal interface (Australia), we no longer display a message when the server disconnects or reconnects. Displaying a message was interfering with unattended program operation. The user can tell if the server is working by checking the color of the BullSignal icon in the tray.

28. In the Transaction Log, you can change the smallest tick of the Price of a specific item by right clicking in the price field. Customers have asked that we provide greater precision in this field because sometimes an order is filled at two or more different prices and you need to enter an average price. And rather than change this entire column to a higher precision, we decided it would probably be best to allow the user to spot change it by item.

29. Also in the Transaction Log, there is a transaction type called “Reb”, which is short for commission rebate. Transactions of this type have always been treated by the Portfolio Manager’s reporting system as a kind of service charge, except that a service charge is a debit and a rebate is a credit. It has been brought to our attention that since commissions play a role in capital gains and losses, a commission rebate should also be accounted for among capital gains and losses. Therefore we have changed the way this kind of transaction is accounted for within the reports. In the Realized G/L report, you will see rebates itemized, with dates. In the Capital G/L Tax report, rebates are consolidated and presented as a single line item in a separate new section apart from short and long term trades, as the program currently has no way of telling whether commission rebates should be associated with short or long term gains/losses. Finally, “Reb” transactions now parcel, along with regular trades, when you use the Parcel Transactions function.

30. In the Parcel Transactions dialog, we now show 2 decimal points of precision on the distribution percentages. Note that this does not make any difference in terms of what you can accomplish. For instance, let’s say you have to parcel a transaction 7 ways. It has always been acceptable to enter “14.285714” in the percentage field (or you can enter “100/7”, which involves less typing and is even more precise) and the program will use that number while performing the distribution, even though it is displaying a rounded “14.29%” (formerly a rounded “14%”).

31. In Graphic Analysis, when you right click in the graph area to bring up the Horizontal Axis dialog, the Center Price field will automatically contain the price represented by the current position of the wand. Click OK and the graph will instantly center on that price. This makes it quick and easy to re-center the graph, as well as get specific P/L and Greek numbers at that price.

32. You can now browse from the Account Status and TradeFinder windows. Just click on one of the positions or recommended trades, then click the Matrix, Price Chart or Volty Chart button and the program will open the Matrix, Price Chart or Volty Chart for that asset. Then, if you click the Prev or Next buttons (or press the PageUp or PageDown keys), the open window(s) will switch to the asset represented by the previous or next position or trade recommendation in the list. This brings the total number of windows you can use as a basis for browsing to seven. For the sake of consistency, in all of these windows, if you double-click an item in the list, the program obeys your preferences in terms of what happens if you double-click in the Quotes Display (usually, opening a Matrix). In the case of TradeFinder this represents a change. Before, double-clicking a trade recommendation in TradeFinder opened a Graphic Analysis. You can still open a Graphic Analysis by selecting a trade recommendation and then clicking the Analyze button. In at least a couple of the other browse-basis windows, double-clicking an item used to insert a symbol into the Quotes Display at the current cursor location. You can still do that by selecting an item and then clicking the Insert button on the form. Note that in any of the browse-basis windows, you can select and highlight several of the items in the list and then start browsing, and the browse rotation will be constrained to the items you selected. This can be pretty handy. And one more thing: When browsing Matrixes off the Account Status or TradeFinder windows, the software automatically inserts the position or recommended trade into the Matrix for you. In the case of Account Status, it inserts your position into the Existing Position field(s). In the case of TradeFinder, it inserts the trade recommendation into the Trade field(s).

33. In Account Status, you can now right click on a position or on multiple selected positions and send the symbol(s) of the underlying assets to the Quotes Display.

34. In Account Status, portfolio beta is computed in a new way, using the extrapolated value of each position (delta * underlying price) as the weighting factor. This produces a more meaningful number than when we used the portfolio delta of each position as the weighting factor.

35. Also in Account Status, a new column parameter is available called Asset Theta, which represents a copy of the same theta that you can see in the Matrix for each asset. And in the summary section along the top, there is a new field called Portfolio Theta – representing the sum of the thetas of all your positions.

36. The default Quotes Display now has 51 assets to start out with, versus only 9, and has 10 fields across the page, versus 7. Also, there are now 3 hard-programmed default Matrix cell formats rather than just 1. Other defaults that were changed include 1) clicking the print snapshot button invokes the print dialog box, 2) the default slippage setting is “hit bid/ask”, and 3) in AutoStrike, we accept all 2.5 interval strikes and look for up to 5 months of listed options (formerly 4).

37. We ship the program with a sample account now – called “Sample” – for instructional purposes.

38. The Date field in the BackTrader window now accepts entries like “T+n” and “X1” (just as long as you don’t try to advance it to a date in the future).

39. In the Portfolio Manager, in the Performance Analysis report, under the field Max Drawdown we added a new field: Max % Drawdown. Also, in the Performance Graph, we added fields for entering a data range, so that the user can see his performance over a certain period of time rather than always just from inception of the account.

40. File | Expire All Options now offers the user a choice of either expiring all options in the current account or in all accounts. Previously, it only expired options in the current account.

41. The main help system in OptionVue 5 has been brought up-to-date with fresh content, new illustrations, and better cross-referencing.