First I must appologise as I use what is probably now a dinosaur (Metastock version 6.52). With that in mind this is my question and as I am a novice on the IT side of things so I hope I don't make the question too confusing.

After downloading the end of day data, it is appended in the usuall way to the end of every stock. Every stock sits in an alphabitical folder (so acme gas will be in A folder and beta hats makers will be in folder B and so on.

What I am trying to do is create my own folder of my top say 300 stocks, have the end of day data be appended to the copies of stocks in that folder in the usual way and be able to use the change security button to jump through the 300 stocks in my special folder indepndent of the origional A,B,C...Z folders. Unfortunately at the moment if I try to use the use the next security button in my new folder of 300 stocks, it jumps to what would have been the next security for that stock in the origional folder amongst the A,B,C....Z folders. I am then stuck scanning through the origional huge mass of files many of which are of course penny dreadfulls and so on.

I hope somebody can shed some light on this.

Favorites did not exist until version 7, I believe. That said, if you used the Tools-->Copy command in The DownLoader to make a new folder of your favorite stocks and you then opened one of these securities, I would expect it to continue browsing to the next security in that new folder. Are you opening a Smart Chart from this newly created folder or some other type of chart? You may also want to try and do a Tools-->Test on the folder. Perhaps the MASTER file is corrupted or something, because Next Security should have no concept of your other data folders. It simply reads the MASTER file in this folder and moves to the next symbol.