Share Price Feedback

Rav,

I have written to Reckon and also discussed problems in the past.  The following is an extract from a document I emailed in Aug-2014. There have been further suggestions since then. I have discussed these problems with Greg Deacon and more recently with Neil Rustidge. I have not received any advice that any of these suggestions have been addressed.

There are also numerous posts on this Forum over the last 12 months discussing ongoing problems with RPP, additional to those listed below.

There is also a basic problem with the .qph file, as the record structure is not robust. Should it become corrupted, a validate process could not easily reconstruct the file. An additional field in the price record could easily overcome this problem and remove some of the corruption problems that are regularly reported on the forum.

It is very disappointing that, based on recent performance, Reckon do not appear to be capable of addressing these issues. How is the 9% price increase justified ?

{extract from email sent on  27 Aug 2014}

Changes to Share Price Download and Security Detail View

7-day Limitation
One of the main annoyances in the share price download facility is the limitation of a 7-day database. There can be many diverse reasons that users are not able to download each week, which provides for gaps in the data. This has always annoyed me and I have requested changes to help fix this problem.  There are a number of changes that could overcome this, including extending the 7-day dataset or improving the .csv import facility.

Why 7 days ?
Could the database be extended to longer. I have written my own external update facility, which I shall discuss later, that provides 7 years of updates. This is limited to company listings on the ASX and has resulted in a dataset of only 15 mb per year. I would anticipate there might be licensing restrictions for Reckon providing this extended data set, especially for S&P indices, but it is not a significant issue. A better approach would be to update the data set from the last time the update was requested or optionally update and correct for selected companies since a specified date. The update verification pop-up could provide a recommended date for possible change.

Import Prices
The import prices .csv format provides for both a short form and a longer form, which includes High, Low and Volume. The extended form appears to be poorly designed and has some limitations or errors with the Volume entry. At present the Volume is imported as Volume/100 and has magnitude test to between 0 to 20,000,000 shares. I would suggest that this is a bug as the 20 million limit should be applied to the input “Volume/100”, rather than the resulting Share Volume. This affects a number of ASX listings, including Telstra, BHP and many lower priced shares. This error should be fixed and a simpler .csv format that inputs Volume directly should be published.

Security Detail View
There are a number of changes that could be easily applied to this feature.
Volume chart: There is a bug in this as the volume is accumulated as a 4-byte integer which overflows above 2 billion shares. This is readily demonstrated with a weekly volume report for 2-year and 5-year Nasdaq plot. The volume should be accumulated as a 4-byte real or 8-byte integer to overcome this problem. It is amazing that the Volume chart has been adapted to actually plot negative volume, rather than correcting the overflow.
Date range: I have always been requesting a 6-month plot, as I find the gap between 3-month and 1-year is too much for identifying recent changes.
Active Companies:  After updating share prices, I typically Highlight the company name box, then use the up-arrow and down-arrow to move between companies. As my data set is now nearly 20 years of companies, there are many companies that are no longer active. I would like an optional box to only list companies that are active. "Active" could be further defined as companies that have some share price data in the selected Date Range. This would improve the usability.
Annual statistics: There are a number of fields in the share price viewer that have never been updated on my implementation; showing N/A. These include 12-month High and Low and average volume. Is there an option for updating this or is this a legacy of implementations in other countries?

Market Indices
Market indices were introduced as Historical indices in about 2004. At that time a number were introduced, including ASX indices, although now only US indices are supplied. They (historical prices) actually benefit from having a dataset longer than 7-days, which is different from the present ASX dataset. These indices need review and more that are relevant for Australian users could be provided and documented. My understanding is that they are provided by the ASX daily downloads.

Share Price Export
I am not aware of the Australian version of RPP ever supporting a historical share price export to a .csv file. This would be a useful feature, as it could be used to assist in identifying missing historical share price information, as well as help maintain non ASX company records. Note: This conversation was created from a reply on: Reckon Personal Plus 2016 - What to expect?.