1) When researching and watching specific stocks, I place a LOT of text in the Notes tab ... all of which ends up UNformatted. For me, it would be much better if I could simply define an external file to be used for notes on this stock and then simply click a button or link to display this external file with it's native editor (Wordpad or whatever). Would this be possible?


2) Would it be possible to add a right-click function when in the Notes area, to obtain and paste the Company Profile information for the current stock? Such as Yahoo Finance has available.


3) Would it be possible to add a right-click function when in the Notes area, to obtain and paste the current date (in user-selectable format)? Each of my individual Note entries are prefixed by the current date.


4) Would it be possible to add some basic text formatting controls in the Notes memo area, such as Bold and Underline?


5) I like to keep track of news items that affect the price of my stocks. Currently, I do this all manually and paste the news into the Notes area. Would it be possible to have a right-click function in the News column that when selected, it would extract the text of the linked news story and paste it into the Notes tab of the Properties dialog for that stock, where it could be reduced by manual editing?

Thank you,

-Don

None of these features are available in the current software, and most are quite beyond the scope of what the Notes field was designed for and would require a lot of work to implement. #4 would require using a completely different control in the Notes field since the basic text control we're using doesn't support text formatting.

BTW, you can see company profile information using Jump Points. Just right-click on the ticker, then select Jump Points->Yahoo Finance Company Profile.

 If the news stories are online have you tried the ticker bookmarks tab? Does that get you part of the way towards what you're looking for?

I'm currently working on a tagging/bookmarking thing for http://collabinvest.net because I'm running into the same problems with my own research. I come across countless good articles, but have no good searchable way of organizing them along with any notes I take. It would be public, but once I get this work done it would be easy enough to create a jump point and get to your notes/stories/articles online ... but like I said in that scenario it would be public.

That's why the post it titled "Feature Requests" :).


Even #1 -- Just adding a button or menu item for an "External Notes" file?



Wasn't sure if you were using a memo or text control. Thanks.



Yes, I've used this feature and like it. However, we have a fairly slow DSL Internet connection, so it takes some time to open a browser window, load the page, scroll to the information, etc. It's much slower than simply double-clicking the Note in PSM :).

Since the Notes control is a text control, is there a size limit on the number of characters that can be stored in it -- before PSM would have problems with it?

Thanks!

-Don

Yes I have, Yermo. Thank you for the suggestion. As mentioned in my reply to Anatoly, we have slow DSL so it takes a while to get to what I want. And then, it's just today's stories or maybe a couple of days.

I would rather copy, paste, edit and store the pertinent-to-me news items, keeping a running history of news by date. Mostly stuff such as upgrades, downgrades, Qtr and Yrly results recaps, possible catalysts, etc. Some kind of link to a locally-stored, external file (.txt or .rtf) would really help, since the Notes tab is a text control vs. a memo control.


Sounds like a good idea, but it still must then be retrieved from the Internet.

Thanks guys!

-Don

That part is easy, but to make it a robust solution, there are issues with managing those files that you may not have considered.



As I said, it wasn't intended to have that much data dumped into it. As far as I remember there is no set limit, but we also haven't tried to dump huge amounts of text into it for stress testing.

Yes, since I'm not into 'modern' programming, I'm sure I look at things a bit too simplistically (sigh). Things always look simpler from the 'user' perspective (LOL).

Thanks for the info on the Notes control. I'll try to keep the content within some reasonable limit

Anatoly and I are talking about adding some note taking, tagging and link bookmarking features to http://collabinvest.net.

I can see you not wanting to load a browser each time to review what you're stored, I'll have to give that some thought.

We would really like to get our users interacting on CollabInvest. That was kind of the whole point, but so far the only way people use it is to talk to us.

Yes, I'd rather not have to load a browser, go to a page, etc. I like having all the info in one tidy file that is immediately available on my hard drive

How is CollabInvest different from sites such as the Street.com, Motley Fool and other stock-related web sites that have user forums? How is it set apart from all the others and what can we do in CollabInvest that can't be done in the other major stock / investing forums?

The idea behind CollabInvest was to create a real social network for investors, but one that is tightly tied into the desktop software.

With CollabInvest you can create friends lists, as you saw, those friends show up your friends list on the site and in the software.

When in the software you can see when your friends are online and then chat with them in realtime, While chatting you can share live updating tickers and charts.

You can treat charts in collabinvest, like a whiteboard, so when one person updates a chart with a new annotation the other person sees it live.

There are also a bunch of on-site social features, from following the updates of others, to participating in the forums. Adding a groups concept with group chatrooms, both public and private is on the todo list.

The thought had been that many of our users work together on their investing ideas, and we wanted to create an environment where it was more convenient for that work to happen. If two users were in PSM, maybe they would be more likely to invite a third. Etc. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened.

We have 1160 accounts signed up now for collabinvest, but mostly people just use it to chat with us when we're around. We're considering starting a weekly scheduled chat with our customers; but haven't gotten around to that yet.

But as you can see, there's not alot going on on CollabInvest. Since users are not bringing in their friends to collaborate here, we're struggling with the classic social network seeding problem ... we have a bunch of features there, but few people jumping in.

So mostly I've been using the status update feature to keep track of articles I find around the net. It's actually pretty convenient to take notes and keep links and tag them.

However, it's not as well organized for that purpose as I would like, so I'm radically expanding the tagging system and am coming up with what I call a social knowledgebase concept. Once I'm done with this update you'll be able to save a link with some notes, tag it, save it and find it later. There will be a popularity rating associated with each link depending on the number of users who have saved that link. I'm also going to index it by ticker symbol, so if we get some users here, you'll be able to search for all posts in a given time range, about a given ticker symbol, tagged with a given tag (such as "earnings").

More on that later.

Thank you for your explanation, Yermo

Ahhh yes ... "social network" ... this is a fairly new phrase in my vocabulary / life. I have a Facebook page, but not much else, social-networking wise. I'll try to keep a closer eye on CollabInvest to see how I might be able to use it. I just don't know anyone else who is an ACTIVE (daily/weekly) investor like I am. Most of my friends are long-term investors (months/years), not day or swing traders.

Our hope is that we can eventually build CollabInvest up so that like minded investors who want to collaborate on research, ideas, trades can find one another. We'll see if we can achieve that goal.

FYI, for anyone following this thread ... Just tried adding another entry into the Notes tab of one of my tickers and it would not allow me to add any more text. I copied and pasted the text into a text editor and found it to be 30,000 characters. So, I guess that's the limit for the Notes tab.

-Don