Metastock file format - what is advantage?

[Kedar Agarkar]

Hi,

I wish to know what is the advantage/trade-off in having Stock market
data in Metastock or Comptrac file format [for any financial
application to process it] ?

Is the only advantage being interoperability between different
financial softwares, many of which take data in Metastock format? Or
is there any purely technical advantage in having in Metastock format?
Is it that many of financial graphics libraries would take only
Metastock formats as an input to their many Indicator of Chart
routines?

Is there any advantage in having in Metastock format, from perspective
of speed of access [for any online use], size of data, checksum or
anything like that ?.

Thanks for your time.

- KA

[JGM]

Personally I can't see any major advantages to the Computrac format - only
disadvantages:

- much more difficult to create than comma separated or xml

- much less supported (really just the vendors of Metastock, Omnitrader,
etc.)

- makes non-programming users dependant on data vendors like eSignal or
require software to transform csv to computrac

You have to ask yourself why MetaStock cannot:

- natively handle DDE? (ie without 3rd party software)
- handle csv or xml (hello! xml=industry standard)

The only minor plus for computrac is the smaller file size, but even this
can be equalled with compression of other formats. I can't see any valid
reasons for clinging on to 1980s technology. If Metastock could handle csv
then you could get all your data free from yahoo.

JGM

Post by Kedar Agarkar
Hi,
I wish to know what is the advantage/trade-off in having Stock market
data in Metastock or Comptrac file format [for any financial
application to process it] ?
Is the only advantage being interoperability between different
financial softwares, many of which take data in Metastock format? Or
is there any purely technical advantage in having in Metastock format?
Is it that many of financial graphics libraries would take only
Metastock formats as an input to their many Indicator of Chart
routines?
Is there any advantage in having in Metastock format, from perspective
of speed of access [for any online use], size of data, checksum or
anything like that ?.
Thanks for your time.
- KA