Getting Started: A Quick Howto

This document assumes that you do not have your own end-of-day data available and so shows how to obtain some quick data from the Yahoo service.

• Connect to the internet.
• Open the Quotes dialog from the toolbar.
• Select the Yahoo plugin. This will bring up the Yahoo Quotes dialog.
• From the Yahoo Quotes dialog, press the "New Symbol" button from its toolbar. This brings up the "New Yahoo Symbols" dialog.
• From the "New Yahoo Symbols" dialog, enter as many yahoo ticker symbols as you want separated by a space, e.g. "RHT IBM MSFT BHP BHP.AX". The Yahoo Quote documentation explains how to get quotes from different exchanges. When done, press the OK button.
• From the Yahoo Quotes dialog, select "History" from the method list. Press the "Select All Symbols" checkbox. Specify a "Start Date". Press OK when done.
• From the Quotes dialog, press the Update button, and the downloads will start. Depending on how fast your connection is and how many stocks and how much history, this could take anywhere from 10 seconds to a few minutes. The data will be imported into Qtstalker when completed.
• Close the quotes dialog when download has completed.
• To load a chart, select the "Work with Charts" button in the Navigation panel. There will be a directory called "Stocks". This directory structure will contain the various stocks downloaded, organised in sub-directories per stock exchange. Navigate the Stocks directory and select a symbol to load by clicking on it.
• Some default indicators were created when you installed Qtstalker.
• To add more indicators, open the "New Indicator" dialog from the toolbar and choose an indicator from the list. The indicator dialog will open, just press OK for the default settings. Note that using "CUS" enables better access to the indicator functions and can plot multiple indicators as one.
• After the close of the market on each day, you will update your end-of-day data. Again open the Quotes dialog from the toolbar and select the Yahoo plugin. This time use the "Auto History" method, which will automatically determine the last day that you updated and then retrieve the new data.
• This should be enough to get you started for now. Consult the documentation and play with the functions to become familiar with how Qtstalker works. If you do have your own end-of-day data, perhaps purchased from a provider as plain text files, then see the "CSV Quote" plugin, or create your own quote plugin for a specialised purpose.