How about a Stock Market Puppy (SMP)?

[jpeps]

My experience leads me to believe that technical analysis methods, such as candlesticks, are in general a reliable predictor of the future movement of any given stock only during strong bull markets. That is, when macroeconomic forces are driving a flood of new money into the stock market.

It's rumored that vovchik will be coming out with an enhanced wave for making successful bets in the stockmarket in the next Zensound, eliminating the need for fumbling around with messy analyses that rarely work anyway.

[Sit Heel Speak]

...messy analyses that rarely work anyway...

Well, if candlesticks are working for you, then by all means keep using them.

My take is: high-quality fundamental analysis has been historically well-proven to work reliably for the small individual investor who is in it for the long run, but fundamental analysis is not much good for purposes of short-term trading. Technical analysis works for both the long and short run only so long as the overall market trend is strongly bullish. But nowadays it ain't. So, under the present environment, amid a bewildering array of bearish crises, punctuated by such big-player interventions as happened today, you can't be too attached to either of the analysis religions.

If it will make you feel any better, I was down 7% overall today. But this is in an all-puts portfolio, on a day when the S & P 500, representing 75% of all market capitalization, was up a very robust 1.88%. Which is good enough as a show of capital preservation under adverse circumstances that I am *tempted* to extend my hand and say, in my best Arnie voice, "Come with me if you want to live." Or perhaps, doing my Johnny Depp, "Can you sail under a pirate captain?"

(Nawww...if I tried to prescribe for people what options to buy and sell, and when, they'd die of heart failure. If I stuck to just shepherding a buy-and-hold-for-a-month-or-two-or-three portfolio of nothing but blue-chip stocks, you'd crucify me for missing opportunities that in retrospect seemed obvious --such as the near-tripling in value overnight last night of the aforementioned 1215 October SPX calls )

I think I'd better make just myself rich first --quietly. Then I will presume to preach

[technosaurus]

I wrote a little ash script that will give you a list of quotes in a gtkdialog gui here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=72850
it should be fairly extendable (see zigbert's pprocess for a similar gui that can be modified)