smtm(1)

NAME

smtm - Display and update a configurable ticker of global
stock quotes

SYNOPSYS

smtm [options] [stock_symbol ...]

OPTIONS

--time min minutes to wait before update
--file smtmrc to store/retrieve stocks selected
--proxy pr network address and port of firewall
proxy --fwall [id:pw] account and password for firewall --chart len select length of data interval shown in
chart: (must be one of b, w, 3, 6, 1, 2, 5 or m)
--timeout len timeout in seconds for libwww-perl UserA
gent --wide also display value changes and holdings --percent show relative performance in percent in
stead of bps --sort style sort display by specified style: (must be one r, a, p, v, n, v, V or h)
--columns set choose the columns to display (can be any
combination: of s, n, l, a, r, v, p, V, R, h)
--nookbutton close other windows via left mouseclick,
suppress button --help print a short help message

DESCRIPTION

smtm, which is a not overly clever acronym for Show Me The Money, is a financial ticker and portfolio application for
quotes from exchanges around the world (provided they are
carried on Yahoo!). It creates and automatically updates a
window with quotes from Yahoo! Finance. It can also dis
play the entire variety of charts available at Yahoo!
Finance. When called with one or several symbols, it dis
plays these selected stocks. When smtm is called without
arguments, it reads the symbols tickers from a file, by
default ~/.smtmrc. This file can be created explicitly by calling the Save option from the File menu. Beyond stocks,
smtm can also display currencies (from the Philadephia
exchange), US mutual funds, options on US stocks, several
precious metals and quite possibly more; see the Yahoo!
Finance website for full information.

smtm can also aggregate the change in value for both indi
vidual positions and the the entire portfolio. For this,
the number of shares is needed, as well as the cross-cur
rency expression pair. The standard ISO notation is used.
As an example, GBPUSD translates from Pounds into US Dol
lars. To compute annualised returns, the purchase date and
purchase price can also be entered.

smtm displays the full name of the company, the absolute
price change and the relative percentage change in basis
points (i.e., hundreds of a percent) or in percentages if
the corresponding option has been selected. Other infor
mation that can be displayed are the traded volume, the
profit/loss, the aggregate positon value, the holding
period length, the annualised return, the drawdown, the
earnings per share, the price/earnings ratio, the dividend
yield, and the market capitalization. Note that the return
calculation ignores such fine points as dividends, and
foreign exchange appreciation or depreciation for foreigns
stocks. All display columns can be selected, or dese
lected, individually.

Losers are flagged in red. smtm can be used for stocks
from the USA, Canada, various European exchanges, various
Asian exchanges (Singapore, Taiwan, HongKong, Kuala
Lumpur, ...) Australia and New Zealand. It should work for
other markets supported by Yahoo. US mutual funds are also
available, but less relevant as their net asset value is
only computed after the market close. Some fields might be
empty if Yahoo! does not supply the full set of fields;
the number of supported fields varies even among US
exchanges. The sorting order can be chosen among eight
different options.

The quotes and charts are delayed, typically 15 minutes
for NASDAQ and 20 minutes otherwise, see
http://finance.yahoo.com for details. New Zealand is rumoured to be somewhat slower with a delay of one hour.
However, it is worth pointing out that (at least some) US)
indices are updated in real time at Yahoo!, and therefore
available in real time to smtm. Intra-day and five-day
charts are updated during market hours by Yahoo!, other
charts with longer timeframes are updated only once a week
by Yahoo!.

smtm supports both simple proxy firewalls (via the --proxy option) and full-blown firewalls with account and password
authorization (via the --fwall option). Firewall account name and password can be specified as command line argu
ments after --fwall, or else in a pop-up window. This
setup has been in a few different environments.

smtm can display two more views of a share position.
Clicking mouse button 1 launches a detailed view with
price, date, change, volume, bid, ask, high, low, year
range, price/earnings, dividend, dividend yield, market
capital information, number of shares held and annualised
return. However, not all of that information is available
at all exchanges. Clicking the right mouse button display
a chart of the corresponding stock; this only works for US
and Canadian stocks. The type of chart can be specified
either on the command-line, or via the Chart menu. Choices
are intraday, five day, three months, six months, one
year, two years, five years or max years. The default
chart is a five day chart. The middle mouse button opens
an edit window to modify and augment the information
stored per stock.

See http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/fin/chart/ for help on Yahoo! Finance charts.

smtm has been written and tested under Linux. It should
run under any standard Unix, success with Solaris, HP-UX
and FreeBSD is confirmed (but problems are reported under
Solaris when a threaded version of Perl is used). It also
runs under that other OS from Seattle using the ActivePerl implementation from http://www.activestate.com. In either case, it requires the Perl/Tk module for windowing, and
the LWP module (also known as libwww-perl) for data retrieval over the web. The excellent Date::Manip modules is also required for the date parsing and calculations.
With recent versions of ActivePerl, only Date::Manip needs
to be installed on top of the already provided modules.

EXAMPLES

smtm CSCO NT
creates a window following the Cisco and Nortel stocks.: smtm MSFT:Bill SUNW:Scott ORCL:Larry
follows three other tech companies and uses the override feature for the displayed name. [ Historical note: We once needed that for European stocks as Yahoo! did not supply the company name way back in 1999 or so. This example just documents a now ancient feature. ]: smtm BT.A.L::10:GBPCAD T::10:USDCAD; BCE.TO::10 13330.PA::10:EURCAD "555750.F:DT; TELECOM:10:EURCAD"
creates a window with prices for a handful of telecom com panies on stock exchanges in London, New York, Toronto, Paris and Frankfurt. Note how a names is specified to override the verbose default for the German telco. Also determined are the number of shares, here 10 for each of the companies. Lastly, this example assumes a Canadian perspective: returns are converted from British pounds, US dollars and Euros into Canadian dollars. Quotation marks have to be used to prevent the shell from splitting the argument containing spaces. [ Historical note: The Deutsche Telecom stock can now also be referenced as DTEGn.DE; similarly other stock previously available only under their share number are now accessible using an acronym reflecting their company name.]

MENUS

Four menus are supported: File, Edit, Chart and Help. The File menu offers to load or save to the default file, or
to 'save as' a new file. Exit is also available.

The Edit menu can launch windows to either add a new stock
or delete one or several from a list box. Submenus for
column selection based on various criteria are available.
Similarly, the Sort menu allows to select one of eight
different sort options. Further, one can modify the delay
time between updates and choose between the default title
display or the wide display with changes in the position
and total position value.

The Charts menu allows to select the default chart among
the eight choices intraday, five day, three months, six
months, one year, two years, five years or 'max' years.
Chart sizes can be selected among three choices. Plot
types can be selected among line chart, bar chart and the
so-called candlestick display. For both moving averages
and exponential moving averages, six choices are avilable
(5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 200 days, respectively) which can
all be selected (or deselected) individually. Similarly,
any one of seven popular technical analysis charts can be
added. Logarithmic scale can be turned on/off. Volume bar
charts as also be selected or deselected. Similarly,
Bollinger bands and the parabolic SAR can be selected. A
selection box can be loaded to enter another symbol (or
several of these, separated by comma) for performance com
parison. Lastly, the gallery command can launch the dis
play of a chart for each and every stock symbol currenly
loaded in the smtm display. Note that intra-day and
intra-week charts do not offer all the various charting
options longer-dated charts have available.

Lastly, the Help menu can display either the text from the
manual page, or the copyright information in a new window.

DISPLAY

The main window is very straightforward. For each of the
stocks, up to eleven items can be displayed: its symbol,
its name, its most recent price, the change from the pre
vious close in absolute terms, the change in relative
terms, the volume, the profit or loss, the total position
value, the holding period, the annualised return (bar F/X
effects or dividends) and the drawdown relative to the
52-week high. The relative change is either expressed in
basispoints (bps), which are 1/100s of a percent, or in
percent; this can be controlled via a checkbutton as well
as an command-line option. Further display options are
earnings per share, price/earnings ratio, dividend yield
and market capitalization. This display window is updated
in regular intervals; the update interval can be specified
via a menu or a command-line option.

The window title displays the relative portfolio profit or
loss for the current day in basispoints, i.e., hundreds of
a percent, or in percent if the corresponding option is
chosen, as well as the date of the most recent update. If
the --wide options is used, the net change and ney value
of the portfolio (both in local currency) are also dis
played.

Clicking on any of the stocks with the left mouse button
opens a new window with all available details for a stock.
Unfortunately, the amount of available information varies.
Non-North American stocks only have a limited subset of
information made available via the csv interface of
Yahoo!. For North American stocks, not all fields all pro
vided by all exchanges. Clicking on the details display
window itself closes this window. Clicking on any of the
stocks with the right mouse button opens a new window with
a chart of the given stock in the default chart format.
This option was initially available only for North Ameri
can stocks but now works across most if not all markets,
thanks to expanded support by Yahoo!. Clicking on the
chart window itself closes this window. Finally, the mid
dle mouse button opens an edit window.

BUGS

Closing the stock addition or deletion windows have been
reported to cause random segmentation violation under
Linux. This appears to be a bug in Perl/Tk which will
hopefully be solved, or circumvented, soon. This bug does
not bite under Solaris, FreeBSD or NT or other Linux dis
tributions. Update: This problem appears to have disap
peared with Perl 5.6.*.

Problems with undefined symbols have been reported under
Solaris 2.6 when Perl has been compiled with thread sup
port. Using an unthreaded Perl binary under Solaris works.
How this problem can be circumvented is presently unclear.

It is not clear whether the market capitalization informa
tion is comparable across exchange. Some differences could
be attributable to 'total float' versus 'free float' cal
culations.

COPYRIGHT

Updates to this program might appear at http://dirk.eddel_ buettel.com/code/smtm.html. If you enjoy this program, you might also want to look at my beancounter program
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/beancounter.html.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it
and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation;
either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
later version. There is NO warranty whatsoever.

The information that you obtain with this program may be
copyrighted by Yahoo! Inc., and is governed by their usage
license. See http://www.yahoo.com/docs/info/gen_dis_ claimer.html for more information.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Perl code by Dj Padzensky, in particular his
Finance::YahooQuote module (on the web at http://www.padz.net/~djpadz/YahooQuote/ as well as at http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/yahooquote.html/) and his Finance::YahooChart module (on the web at
http://www.padz.net/~djpadz/YahooChart/) were most help ful. They provided the initial routines for downloading
stock data and determining the Yahoo! Chart url. Earlier
version of smtm use a somewhat rewrittem variant (which
still reflected their heritage), newer version rely
directly on Finance::YahooQuote now that Yahoo! uses a similar backend across the globe. Dj's code contribution
is most gratefully acknowledged.

CPAN

The remaining sections pertain to the CPAN registration of
smtm. The script category is a little mismatched but as
there is no Finance section, Networking was as good as the other choices.

SCRIPT CATEGORIES

Networking

PREREQUISITES

smtm uses http://www.activestate.com. In either case, it requires the "Tk" module for windowing, the "LWP" module
for data retrieval over the web, and the excellent
"Date::Manip" module for the date parsing and calcula
tions.

COREQUISITES

None

OSNAMES

smtm is not OS dependent. It is known to run under Linux,
several commercial Unix variants and Windows

docs.sk

comprehensive documentation repository

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