Project Stockmaster: EAv Ticker Tracker

Project Codename: Stockmaster is a multiple-monitor, graphical stock tracker for Empire Avenue. It is designed to solve a few very specific problems:

EAv has no tracking several stocks simultaneously
EAv has no multiple-monitor stock tracking
EAv has no automatic refreshing and passive stock monitoring
EAv has poorly chosen integrated stock suggestions
EAv has no automatic purchasing of stocks likely to contribute to your portfolio

Project Codename: Stockmaster is designed to solve these problems It does not require multiple monitors, but your experience will be greatly improved if you have them; just watch the video to see it in full swing! This app is multithreaded and does most of its work in the background. Therefore, when you open a new window, it may not do anything right away. Instead, it starts its lookups and populates the results when they come back from EAv.

No installation is needed for this program. Just install the .NET Framework, unzip the files somewhere, and run the EXE.

> > > Download Alpha 3 Here < < < - Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 or higher.

Empire Avenue is a virtual online stock market trading game. For the purposes of this project and document, I will assume you are familiar with it.

Main Window

The main window opens when you load the app and serves as a launching platform for all the other stuff you do from the app. From here you can see a regularly updated cash indicator and access the menu system.

Ticker Chart: Opens a chart and info window for up to 20 tickers. One ticker per window.
Lookup by Price: This will be a way to look up stocks that are around a certain price range, sorted by dividends descending, to help you find and choose good stocks to buy. This feature is currently disabled awaiting EAv API feature implementation.
New Stock Monitor: Monitors EAv for new stocks, allowing you to see who the newest players are and how great a start they're off to. This is currently the only Discovery feature in the app.

Ticker Chart

Before you can view a price graph or user info, you must specify which profile(s) you want to view. Enter up to 20 tickers, comma delimited, as shown. Obviously, the ellipse [...] is to indicate you can type in up to 20; you cannot actually specify "stock1 through stock20", because tickers are rarely labeled sequentially.

When you click OK, a new window will open for each of the up to 20 stock tickers you have entered.

The Ticker Chart is designed to give you a glimpse of everything going on with one specific stock ticker. Here you have access to a stock price graph, which is updated every minute, as well as a wealth of information about that ticker and its activity on EAv.

The price graph automatically scales from the lowest price minus five to the highest price plus five. So if the stock has varied between 30 and 50, it will scale from 25 to 55. Stocks will usually appear flat because stock prices rarely vary faster than 5-10 minute intervals.

The User Profile Information section will display basic information about the stock, such as who it is and some basic price information. Here you can also see information such as how many shares you're allowed to own, trade volume, current commission, number of shareholders, number of investments in their portfolio, and how many shares you own.

There are four buttons on this window:

Reset will reset the tracked numbers, as if you had just opened the window.
Profile will open the user's profile page in your default web browser.
Buy will open the Buy window.
Sell will open the Sell window.

The Sell feature has not yet been implemented, and is thus disabled.

Buy

The Buy window will allow you to purchase shares of that stock. An EAv-like slider will allow you to choose how many shares to buy, on a scale of 0 to MAX, where MAX is either the number you're allowed or the number you can afford, whichever is less. That's a feature that even Empire Avenue's website forgot!

As you slide the slider, three values will update: Number of shares selected, Subtotal, and Total. Subtotal is the gross cost (price times quantity), and Total is the transaction's grand total with commission factored in.

Dividends per Share and Price/Dividend Ratio are currently unavailable and don't do anything, because EAv does not appear to expose this information over their API. I intend to implement these features (and heuristics based thereof) when EAv implements these API features.

New Stocks Monitor

The New Stocks Monitor window keeps track of the newest signups on Empire Avenue, and shows them to you, newest first. You can click on the column headers to sort by any of them. By comparing the current price ("last_trade") to their Created timestamp, you can infer some indication of how active they will be on EAv.

Double-clicking any row will open the corresponding ticker's profile page on the Empire Avenue website in your default web browser. There you can see how many social networks they've plugged into, and click any of them to look at their profile on these social networks, which will tell you how active they are before EAv even starts scoring them.

By comparing these two data points, you can make some educated guesses as to which stocks will take off quickly, before the market has time to catch up. You can also watch the ticker and full_name columns to look for tickers you may recognize via brand recognition. Such recognition may serve as a good indication of how many people will buy into a stock quickly, and therefore how quickly their stock price may rise.

The 'Iteration' column is injected by the app, rather than being provided by EAv. This tells you in which refresh iteration the ticker was added. For example, if a ticker is found on the 30th time the window is refreshed automatically, it will be in iteration 30. Therefore the vast majority will have Iteration 1, as every lookup returns the 100 most recent tickers to sign up but new users only sign up, on average, every 2-3 minutes.

Please note this window only updates the top 100 most recent rows upon each refresh, due to API limitations.

http://empireavenue.com/?t=fjcldtgn