Hi everybody, My name is Christian and although I've had Metastock for a long, long time I rarely have time these days to work on analysing the stock market anymore. Anyway, I have a few questions that hopefully someone can help me with. I'm trying to narrow down results using Metastock formula for explorations and system back testing. How do I get a system when backtesting to always have to create one buy AND one sell order only? My other question is how do I get a system to do multiple passes of a system or exploration rather than just a one-pass arrangement? e.g. I find one result out of the first scan and pass that to the next scan to keep narrowing down, for example. I'm looking for methods and suggestions of doing the above as I'm looking to create an automated rules-based trading system and need a way of of doing multi-pass scanning rather than having to run scans manually (or its not really automated, is it?) Thus far I've got the sections of the system that: Ensure ample volume Create buy and sell signals (though as I mentioned above my method creates "randoms" occasionally hence also needing a way of smoothing oscillators) Ensure that the stocks it finds have at least a healthy percentage of traded days (rather than what I call "Flatliners" where some days a stock doesn't trade at all) I really only need some assistance with how best to narrow down the field a bit further. Look forward to hearing from you. Christian

Hi, sorry its taken so long for me to get back to you in response. In regards to what you're saying, the system will have both open and close trade conditions and I just haven't included a brief of the entire system. I'm probably not explaining myself very well. My reason for wanting to be able to do multi-pass scanning/explorations is that rather than searching criteria en-mass, I'd like to be able to conduct each search separately (but in an automated fashion still) with each individual search narrowing down a bit more each time a new search is done. e.g. in Metastock, is there a way of telling the system to run an exploration, get the result and then run a further exploration from the results of the previous save search? I know there is one for just the last search but is there any way to reuse the last search results (and save them as a list of favourites to re-search?) e.g. do one search to weed out non-liquid shares by a volume search then save the list as a favourite. Then conduct another search on that saved favourites list to find those that have a certain level of volatility, continuing on and on until you've narrowed it down to a very very specific list based on all of the criteria? I understand what you're saying in regards to including all of the criteria in searches but rather than searching all of the criterna at once, which simply just wastes time really (as many of the results will be repeated over and over again, anyway) I'd like to be able to search on pre-defined lists (rather than having to weed out the stock list manually), hence the reason for my asking whether there is a way to save these lists and re-use them somehow. e.g. with my method you'd only have to run a full exploration on the entire set say once every few weeks with only interim searches needed on equities that have met the previous broad criteria. Not sure if there's a way of doing this? I can see there is a way to save a favourites list but how do I then re-use that list for further exploration searches with other explorers? Anyway, just asking the question as at least this way it makes Metastock more modular in its use with criteria being able to be selected from a group of explorations so it can be used as a truly automated trading system rather than having to manually run each exploration. I know it doesn't seem that there's much difference but being able to run an exploration on a result set from a previously save result set makes life a lot easier in terms of narrowing down sets of results.

I guess what I'm asking though also is whether there's any way to automate it so it will run a series of explorations rather than one at a time? Also I did send you a message (wabbit) previously asking if you'd be willing to design a system but never heard anything back from you. Regards, Christian

Sweeeet! Thanks for that, will hunt the email down and shoot it through again. Regards, Christian