If you're having any problems, or want to suggest some improvements, please post below!

Level2 changes
In the last few weeks we've needed to implement some code changes to make us compliant with the LSE's rules on the access of Level2 data.

The following requirement is now in place:
You can only use 1 program on 1 computer to access Level2 on MoneyAM using a single username.

This means that you are able to view as many Level2 windows using any one particular browser, or program, that you wish, however you will not be able to use both Firefox and Internet Explorer at the same time (the same goes for using Quote Tracker or TradeSeeker at the same time as viewing it using a web browser)

If you find you're being logged off of MoneyAM's Level2 with the message 'you've logged on from another location' then check the above and make sure you're not running any other programs at the same time before reporting this as a bug.

:)

Still wrong and I can't get hold of anyone to fix it. Sadly my programming skills are limited to setting an egg timer

2) A couple of ideas nicked from the defunct NothingVentured stockwatch screen:

As the "News" icon is white it is quite easy to miss when it appears. Also if a second piece of news appears later, there is no way of knowing this from the stockwatch screen. etc.

Don't hold your breath Dell! MoneyAM's IanT and I have had this exact (in fact eerily almost word for word) discussion about news every few months :-) I even sent screenshots of NV's news notification system which I made when that site was still going, just in case my description wasn't doing it justice.

It's a pity the stockwatch screen can't be improved but I'm guessing it's not a commercial priority because all suggestions are politely filed on the list of things that MoneyAM will look at but never manage to action. I do hold out some hope though that one day the company will take itself away from some of the cutting edge stuff and get back to addressing some of the basics, but if it's the cutting edge stuff that brings in the business, who can argue with that?

I probably shouldn't say this, but these days I find the whole thing quite funny in a dark sort of way because I'm a software developer - and recent circumstances mean I'm increasingly dealing with customer requests the way MoneyAM does. This is obviously the Universe's way of teaching me a lesson :-)

Kyoto:

It's not for me to respond for MoneyAM -- I'm sure that Bullshare will do that when he has a moment -- but I do understand what you're getting at.

My company, IST, (as I'm sure you're aware) provided a large part of the base software such as the BB software and all the realtime stockwatch stuff, as well as the MoneyAM Mobile venture. MoneyAM's own developers have added all sorts of stuff, including the charting.

The top priority for us of late has been to introduce a new, faster, more comprehensive feed. Some of it is already there feeding MAM Level 2, which is why Level 2 is now very much more reliable than before. This has been a significant amount of work.

What I would say is don't despair of us, keep those letters and postcards coming with your requests and suggestions -- they really are not ignored, even if it feels that way sometimes.

Cheers

Derek (IST)

Hello Derek,

Wakarimashita :-) It's late, I'm very tired - maybe there's no way of posting about Stockwatch without sounding like I'm complaining. Actually, I don't know why I posted it at all except to possibly save Dell some time and false hopes :-)

I hope it comes across as more of an observation about what is driving MoneyAM forward commercially rather than as a moan because actually I'm past caring about it - and not in a way that I feel negative about any efforts I made or towards any individuals - I mean genuinely past caring one way or the other. I hear what you're saying about letters and postcards but... I think I've given up on this feedback thing with MoneyAM.

I'm very realistic about there being commercial development priorities and I'm not going put up an argument to that because MoneyAM is a business not a charity. Unfortunately, although I'm sure IST and MoneyAM have done excellent work in the last 18 months I'm in the wrong customer demographic to gain any benefit from any of the development work that's been done - so I'm afraid there's been no little if any progress for me since the day I joined when the site was still in Beta.

As I think I admitted, as a software developer it just reminds me that some of my customers around the world are as likely to be as disillusioned with the system feedback thing as I suppose I am here, because we play exactly the same game. If anything, that's what's really nagging at me - seeing the thing from both sides.

All,

Apologies for not picking up on the DOW problem yesterday - I will speak to our guys and our supplier to make sure all is in place for the open this evening.


Kyoto,

Thank you for the feedback - please rest assured that we do listen as much as we can when a suggestion is given to us. We are a small team and development time is at a premium, but if it is a good idea we are more than likely to take it on board.

I will take your notes from your postings and pass them onto Mike and the developers for future consideration - I cannot promise anything as I am but a humble customer service guy, but I am sure they will be given due consideration.

If you have any further comments, please feel free to post them or to E mail me directly - ian@moneyam.com

Regards

Ian

Beeblebrox - I've just ditched Norton and now installed zonealarm - there is a free version or zonealarmpro on 15 day trial. Seems to work fine although I've had to tweek cookie handling to get moneyam to work properly. I've also been advised to buy a router with built in firewall as a better/less troublesome alternative - still looking at this.

Morning Ian,

We are a small team and development time is at a premium

And you have my sincere sympathies for that. As a woefully under-resourced developer myself I know how utterly demoralising it can be to have too many legitimate customer requests and far too little time to address them. At least, I have to say that I hope it's demoralising because if it isn't it implies the developers don't care. This is a psychological aspect of software development that management hardly ever seem to understand... it's a wonder these companies keep their technical people sometimes, because they certainly don't deserve to given the circumstances!

I will take your notes from your postings and pass them onto Mike and the developers for future consideration

And this is the bit where I reply to remind you that we have exactly the same conversation on the boards every four months, and you reply to assure me that the feedback really does matter, and I throw my hands into the air in frustration and think to myself "God, I hope I don't end up have this conversation again in another four months", and then four months later...

\o/

Kyoto,

I have forwarded these ideas onto our boys, as I have done before and I will either get feedback on why we can't, or hopefully, get you some assurances of when we can - let me assure you that I will bully them into an answer and I will come back to you before the week is out.

Thank you for your patience,

Ian

let me assure you that I will bully them into an answer and I will come back to you before the week is out

Now you've got me sitting here laughing - I must be making progress because last time you said two weeks :-)

I didn't intend to add to your workload - please don't feel you have to bother - I'm long past innocence and fast approaching apathy on the subject of MoneyAM's development. And to be realistic, all other things being equal the answer is going to be "interesting idea, we'll schedule that in as a future development" which is exactly what I tell my customers when I have the best of intentions to develop something which I'm not sure is ever going to happen.

My last words on the subject, because I'd like to provide a little context for Mike or any of the other MoneyAM decision makers on the off-chance they read this:

Perhaps like a number of other MoneyAM customers, I sit in my office day after day getting on with my salaried work while trading as a sideline to keep myself sane and provide some entertainment/distraction from the daily grind. I tried trading full-time but I got bored with my own company and suffice to say that I found I wanted more out of life than watching numbers tick by second by second. So, I have a couple of shares in MoneyAM's Stockwatch ticking away at the bottom of the screen as anonymously as possible beneath Visual Studio. I am - for the moment - a confirmed non-professional trader - so multiple windows, Level 2 and a lot of the clever stuff is lost on me. In fact, even when I work from home with the luxury of dedicated trading screens next to my development system, I still don't tend to use such features because I'm working rather than constantly analysing market charts and numbers.

One of the few things that would really enhance my existence out in the lower leagues of the trading world is proper streaming news notification (i.e. with a time) because otherwise I tend to miss things - partly through lack of screens and partly through lack of time to keep scanning everything. I'm actually quiet infuriated - especially as a software developer myself - by the fact that I'm sure I've spent longer talking about this change to Stockwatch than I think it would take to actually do. I mean seriously, how difficult is it to change "N" to a time flag? I can't believe we're talking about a major project here even if it means changing the underlying field data type. Unless the back end system is a complete mess (which I can't believe with IST), or unless your data providers only give you a news data flag (but then, your system still knows when the news is received and can display its own time data).

From a development point of view, MoneyAM appears to be exclusively driven by the needs of full-time traders - or at least people who want more in the way of tools than a basic live price service, and I'm sure this is a subject close to managements' hearts. But it's a pity that one of its most basic services - probably the one which most new customers will experience first - is so limited. I guess I want to raise my hand and remind the management that there are people like me out here too - for whom the Stockwatch is likely to represent 90% of the experience on a day to day basis. A few scraps from the development table would be much appreciated and I believe provide a significant social, if not ultimately economic, return on investment.

I will now go away and shut up! :-)

Kyoto,

You have my word.

Ian

kyoto - thanks for the additional info.

I am not surprised that others yearn for a few features from the old NV stockwatch screen. It was always my preferred choice, until it expired.

After making a couple of requests here(including restoring the correct timestamps on the level2 screen to show actual trade times on delayed trades), I am also realising that fixes and improvements are lower priority than I initially assumed. No doubt there is a numbercruncher somewhere prioritising costs against perceived revenue enhancement and our suggestions don't make it....

I can understand that MoneyAM has to focus on daytraders who pay the most money but there are also full time investors with longer holding timescales(of which I am one) who pay for premium services and use stockwatch as their main primary information source(& pulling up L2 screens for the most interesting stocks).

Spicing up "stockwatch" with a few requested features would no doubt give a lot of users a greater degree of satisfaction and imply that MoneyAM cares.
Even if they only apply the simplest changes, it would show commitment.

Here's hoping....

Rgds
dell

Mike; Don't give up on us yet. Yes, we have list of requests which gets longer and longer each day. Sadly however our policy is that we will implement changes on a 'do we have spare minute' basis and recently we have had no time. However you will notice that we have started to make some small headway in that we had a large number of users wanting streaming charts so we have gone with the flow and done this (not yet finalised). Why was that a priority, well two fold:

1) It was a request made by a large number
2) Commercially it made sense to do it

That is not to say that every change we do is influenced solely by 1 & 2 but it does help us to balance wish aginst need against cost.

On your specific request we are taking a look but in fact we have been contemplating a better alerts service which would be linked to news, which might be a bigger and better solution. More on this at a later date

Mike

Thanks for the reply Mike. Anything that moves us forward is to be welcomed of course, though I do wonder whether we're going down the road of streaming news or pop-up boxes. So does it mean more windows?

What I was trying to give a little insight into is the fact that - necessarily - my trading screen real-estate versus work-screen real estate is small - I don't want to have too many streaming connections open otherwise my corporate IT people are going to complain. They locked me out of CMC for a couple of weeks earlier this year probably due to bandwidth monitoring. Welcome to the real world (sigh).

Also, if I was showing one of my colleagues or my boss something on my screen, and then I got a sudden pop-up window telling me "BARCLAYS BELOW 480!" or "AFX: Psion Shoot themselves in other foot" then this would be bad :-)

I believe my boss and I share a "don't ask don't tell" policy on trading but when it starts to attract attention everyone is ultimately going to lose, MoneyAM possibly included.

I doubt I'm the only member of the 'corporate trading underground' out here but I wonder if sometimes companies like MoneyAM forget the real world this part of its customer base live in and that what we need is a low-profile low-bandwidth solution which has the basics we require packed into a centimeter of space at the bottom of our screens - perhaps "bigger and better solutions" could at least be considered in this context...

[On edit: oops, didn't realise that I'd "hit the tit". Sorry, everybody.]

Hello Dell,

Yes, I miss NV. I didn't trade with them - I just subscribed for the streaming prices - and I really only used it to monitor news. I'd love to know what Fastrade were thinking when they took NV over and threw out all the technology which NV had built, in favour of their 'service'. Still, I suppose it was all about buying the customer base.

I remember how quickly a lot of us went from ESI/Etrade to ADVFN and then here. If a better streaming service were launched by someone else tomorrow then realistically I'd be off, because as I said in a previous post - this is 90% of my daily requirement. I wonder how many other customers would be in the same position? Honestly, perhaps its very few - but I usually take the view that if that's what I'd do, I'm probably not the only one. I'd rather give MoneyAM my business because I think I quite like the people - but that said I can only make allowances for so much if I think a poorer service is costing me money...

OK the DOW loss/ gains works, but in INDU quotes how do I get rid of the fact that the ` latest` news from the DOW is dated Feb.and the chart on the right is yesterdays?

Would it be possible to put the time +or- the date in a field on the Idex Screen Sometimes it is useful

Would, could or will it be possible to order the individual portfolios by Name or Epic as well as date columns. I find the lay out is a little confusing. (I am told I am easily confused.)

Best wishes

Sequestor,

I will get the guys to take a look into this.

Fred,

Thanks for the feedback - I will add it to the earlier comments from Kyoto.

Ian

Ian it also mentions it was updated by some Ashley James bloke, maybe thats the prob.

lol