FYI

Hi,

I am the founder of AlchemCharts. I wanted to address a few things in this thread.

This is not GW's charting system. GW has invested in AlchemCharts, but does not have a stake in it and has nothing to gain by promoting it. I am a long time student and friend of GW who came to him with this idea with only the promise of "if its better than QCharts, I will switch." So anyone saying that this is a "money grab" by GW is inaccurate.

If you had been watching the news in early April, you may have heard of the Heartbleed Bug. During a patch for this, our site was down for a little bit. Everything is back and up and running.

For those that are wondering about the price. We have not yet set a price but will do so soon. It will be comparable to other charting tools like QCharts. With the addition of built in earnings, you wont have to subscribe to Briefing.com, so in total, AlchemCharts will be cheaper.

Finally, GW trading strategies do work. I have been very successful at it and have met others who are very successful at it. I recommend to anyone to take his classes and stick with it. Good things come to those who work hard and are patient.

I will continue monitoring this thread and answer any questions anyone may have. Also, you can contact us at support@alchemcharts.com. I will personally see all of these emails and get back to you as soon as possible.

Michael

Thanks for the update. Most of your post concerning GW is really none of our business, but I appreciate your openness none the less.

I feel ya on the "heartbleed bug". It is proving to be a pain in the behind on my end of things.

I wish you much success with Alchemcharts.

To be honest though, 200+ bucks a month is crazy steep at least for me:-) Especially when many of us have already made the leap to MUCH cheaper platforms like TradeStation, and Think Or Swim. As you know Qcharts is a bloated ship that is quickly sinking, so many of the smart rats, have already bailed out :-) (no offense to anyone still onboard though)

As for me, I liked Qcharts but just could not afford to keep it going, especially when the price keeps driving higher, and higher. Because of that it caused me to put trading on hold until a suitable charting platform could be found. One that was affordable to me at the time.

Will there be some sort of demo or a trial period to give the software a test run when it becomes available? Who knows, if Alchemcharts is a "knock your socks off" product it may persuade several of us to hop ship... again :-) It's gonna be tough though, considering all that TradeStation and Think Or Swim offer. And the price is practically unbeatable.



Again... best of luck to you!
R

I am glad you posted. I agree if one follows GW's teachings one will do very well. I think many will be assisted with your product.

I think your product will be a terrific one. I only wish you could provide the ability to build a few charts. We have talked via email and if you ever have the program that allows me to build my E charts I will be on your product like a chicken on a bug. I love when people go out and use their talent and ability to create. I am so proud of you and your courage to do this.My S/O and I have built a business from scratch and we know what it takes to do that.

If you ever EVER have the ability to build additional charts please PLEASE email me. I will switch so fast it would make my head spin.

Thanks for the update, Michael! From someone that has seen the demo I truly love what you guys are building and plan on using when available. Anyone that is focusing on pure GW trading should see great benefit with your platform. To echo what a few others have stated it was a real burden early on justifying the expense of Qcharts when first getting started. Yes, I know if want to be successful then you need to invest in the tools to help you be successful but $200 was quite steep at the time. That is one of the reason I moved away and started using another platform. Over time when things started coming together and my trading activities help to offset the expense, eventually covering the cost, I came back. I am researching a few other platforms for a possible backup that will also help me with research from time to time but looking forward to your launch. Thanks again!

To address some of the pricing questions.

Market data and exchange fees are expensive. TOS and TS are able to offer a lower cost because they have other revenue streams such as brokerage, data aggregating, and market making which are much more profitable for them. So it behooves them to offer their charting service for less knowing people will most likely use one of their more profitable services. As a small shop project, we just aren't going to be able to offer those services and thus a lower price.

We recognized this early on, and that is why AlchemCharts will come standard with a lot of great tools such as earnings and splits data, candle stick pattern recognition, and integrated note taking. We know we are going to have trouble competing with some of the cheaper charting solutions. So we are creating a product that is so much more helpful and gives those who use it such a greater edge in trading with GW.

I understand your point about Market Data & Exchange fees. And you can only go so low on your price - unless you want to lose money & that's not a very good business model . I don't want to be a doubter, but the version you're offering basically sounds like a scaled-down version of Qcharts, with a few nice-to-have features such as the Split/Earnings info, Candlestick patterns, etc. The thing is though.....TOS, Strategy Desk, & from what I've heard Tradestation too - all have the capability to be setup identically to what Qcharts offered, putting Split/Earnings info on the charts can be done by easily adding a note, and I know TOS can scan for chart patterns easily - not worth paying a Qchart type fee for that. I don't know anyone who still uses Briefing - it's just not needed.

Having said all that, I would love to give alchemcharts a test drive or see the demo. Maybe there's something I'm missing or will see the advantages when it's right in front of me. If it improves the ability to trade - then that's worth something.

Here's hoping the cost for the charts is kept affordable . I do wish you the best in this venture & hope it is a win-win for everyone.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/02/2014 01:17PM by cheetah.

Cheetah,
I am right with you , seems like a scale down version of Qcharts. With a price of $2300+ per year I will keep my Trade station, which cost $0.00 per year. People have to remember that no matter what platform you use, what indicator you have it does not make you a better trader. There is no holy grail , no crystal ball or platform that is going to make you a better trader. What makes you a better trader is : Losing your ego, managing your trades , cutting your loser quick and letting your winners run. That is what is going to make you better trader. Bo

Bojiggle,

I agree with you 100%. With the technology changing so fast, paying that kind of money for charting is not worth it unless you are really that particular. If you trade futures, you can buy a lifetime license to Ninja Trader for $1000.00 and the broker will give you the CME data fees for $5.00 a month and you can use the platform forever. I wouldn't even do that, but it would still be cheaper.

wow!!! as I read this post it really makes me wonder. then I came around this. Thought I would share Trader joe 2





"As the owner of AlchemCharts, I understand that this may be taken as a bias opinion. Despite that, here is what I know: Tradestation has been around for a while and not promoted by Gary in the past. There is a reason why that is. And there is a reason why AlchemCharts is promoted. AlchemCharts is created for Gary's students and is created to make those who follow Gary's teachings very successful in the stock market. As Gary's classes evolve, AlchemCharts will evolve with it. Tradestation will continue being left farther and farther behind. Students who use AlchemCharts will not miss Straight Line Information/HR/HRFP because AlchemCharts has recognition software to identify this for you. Students who use AlchemCharts will not miss earnings, because AlchemCharts will identify this for you. Students who use AlchemCharts will be able to find better, more predictably moving stocks that fit Gary's trading strategies and be able trade more consistently than those using other software. If you are interested in saving a few bucks, don't buy time for your options and use Tradestation. If you are interested in baking Gary's cake, follow Gary's instructions as we transition to AlchemCharts. AlchemCharts will be available later this summer! If you have any questions or comments, please email us at support@alchemcharts.com and not burden others by continuing to post on this thread. Mike ( Developer)"



Michael, I mentioned your software again this weekend. Several people were not aware it was coming and should be contacting you shortly. Looking forward to it. No rush though. I did let them know after making a personal comparison to the others out there that it is better than everything. It is actually comical to look at the others... in my opinion. You have come up with a really great product. Michael, please don't use the terms HRFP or FP any longer. They are not used any longer and a SLI isn't the same thing. I am going to teach the new thing I talked with you about in the July RTP session. Hopefully your team will be able to write code for it in the near future as an on-going update. I believe the current RTP students are going to be excited with the new approach to that aspect of what we do and hope your software will make the doing of that even easier for them than I expect it to be with out it. Keep up the good work. Your product is awesome!

Rookie30, I see you discussing a different platform than QCharts. I'm returning to trading after many years away, and I got QCharts. Is Gary recommending something else now?

AlchemCharts. It's fantastic!

wakeup, has AlchemCharts been released yet?

It certainly is

Looking forward to getting some early feedback from anyone who has already subscribed.

Not the best person to provide feedback as I still use TS but currently testing Alchem just to see. If I had not spent so much time learning and getting comfortable with TS I would definitely make the switch. Pros and cons with both but there are certain things I like and use in TS that can't be done in Alchem. Alchem comes configured to trade Gary's way out of the box. They turn off all bells and whistles so that you do not get distracted. That said I like a bit of flexibility and use fib retracements and extensions from time to time as a tool. Things like that and Echarts are not offered in Alchem. If you plan on sticking 100% to the GW way of trading and not step outside the box then Alchem may be the way to go if you do not mind the cost. Upcoming splits and earnings included in the price.

P.S. As an aside GW mentioned weekend before last in the last Survivor III that Alchem is not ready and he has communicated same to the developer. That said he did not elaborate as to why he felt it was not ready. I have some thoughts but nothing concrete. He told the folks that Alchem was currently being tested by a small group and is not ready regardless of what we might think or have heard. That was two days after I received the email from Alchem stating that registration was open. Apparently a disconnect somewhere.

Hello,

I did not expect this thread to popup again, but since it did and people seem to be eager to hear what's happening I will share with everyone. We completed beta testing early November with very happy reviews from the testers and decided to go live. We only invited 100 users to sign up just in case there were any issues it would be easier to address with a smaller audience. I told Gary to hold off on telling people to sign up so that we could stick to this plan. We are going to continue inviting small groups until we have invited everyone who has registered for our emails. Once we have exhausted our list, Gary will be announcing to the rest of his student body that we are live.

So if you want to sign up, you are more than welcome to! If you want to wait for Gary's announcement, you are welcome to do that too!

Regards,

Michael

Michael

I think you will find that these threads seem to never die. I slated this week to, for lack of a better description, play around and get used to the new system after I finish my nightly work. I concur with the others and definitely like what I have seen to date. Everything is rather intuitive out of the box. The only thing that stumped me at first was adjusting spacing between the candles (number of bars displayed) but figured it out eventually. Appreciate your feedback as it gives me more confidence relying on the data as I get up to speed.

NCT

Here are my initial thoughts on the new charts.....

The options chain needs a total overhaul in my opinion, hard to work with and hard to read. If you select calls and puts you cannot tell whether you are looking at a call or a put. Also you can only select one month at a time. So if you wanted to view months 3 months at a time you cannot do so. Also I like to chart my options and some of the options that chart easily in qcharts will not chart at all on Alchem.

Your ability to manipulate the scale of the chart is very limited. You can not change the vertical size of the candles and bands in scale on the right side (area where price is displayed) as you can in qcharts. You can auto scale the charts but it auto scales all of them and it might not get close to what your looking for in terms of scale.

Data loads pretty slow in comparison to qcharts and overall use of the charts is pretty jumpy. May be my computer but qcharts is very fluid on my machine so not sure.

The quote sheet needs to be updated as well. You can only use a few headings such as symbol, net, last, and industry/sector. Bid and Ask would be very nice.

No hotkey option as in qcharts.

The symbols are different for a lot of the indexes and sub indexes and you must scroll through a downloadable file to find what your looking for. Not that big of a deal but some of the lists are pretty long.

The earnings and splits list are a very nice addition.

When I blow a single chart up across 3 screens I have to completely readjust the scale/spacing/size of the candles and indicators to fit correctly. Then when you return the chart to its respective location the scale/spacing/size does not readjust to fit the smaller screen. You must reset everything again to your preference. There may be a way to get around this but I have not been able to figure it out yet.

Overall the charts have a fairly similar look to qcharts. A lot of the issues that I am having are personal preferences and may not matter to another. However, I believe at the moment qcharts is still my preference. I have spoken with someone from alchem charts through email and they seem to be very professional and eager to correct/improve some of the issues that new users are having. I am excited to see where these charts end up in the future.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/02/2014 09:35AM by fireman1984.

To expand on what fireman said about the symbols the downloadable files to find your ticker symbols are a combined 50K rows long. I had to put into Excel so that I could easily search and find what I needed and still have a long way to go. Some sub indexes are the same but some are much different. I figured out $DJI after some trial and error but would never guess that $CCO would be the Nasdaq. I still have been unable to find the Russell 2000 index symbol. The Russell 2000 ETF is standard IWM but having problems figuring out the actual index. If anyone knows please let me know as I have searched the files a few times. Maybe user oversight or just getting lost in the forest. I think the time saved from being able to setup a workspace out of the box using GW setup will be lost for most users as they struggle to find the symbols.

Now that I have had time to get familiar I also agree about the chart load time and other observations made by fireman. Some charts come back pretty quick but overall a bit slow. Not as bad as QCharts when they made the major change around 2007 - 2008 but still not slow. I hate to leave things negative so I will end that Tech Support has been wonderful and very responsive. These types of opportunities typically arise with a new product launch so I am patiently waiting to see the end result.

NCT

We will be adding a feature to make searching for symbols a lot easier later on.

Regarding the performance, AlchemCharts uses a different method than QCharts default settings to build out it's candles. If you are aware of the settings in QCharts located in "View" -> "Preferences" -> "Multi-Minute Bars" you will see that you can either build faster-less-accurate candles or slower-more-accurate candles. We use the method for slower-more-accurate bars, but have been able to do it much much faster than QCharts can do that. That being said, we also store all of your symbols in a database, so after the first time loading a symbol, all subsequent times loading the same symbol will be much faster. We are making performance one of our top priorities and have discussed it internally more than any other single subject. We have some ideas that we will be testing out soon to see if we can't improve performance even more.

Russell 2000 is actually an interesting case. This past summer, Russell was purchased by London Stock Exchange (LSE) and starting January 1, will not longer be offered as part of the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). This makes Russell 2000 astronomically expensive to provide, and unfeasible to support this early in AlchemCharts life cycle. I see this as possibly being an issue going forward with QCharts as well, but eSignal support isn't providing any information on this. I am not saying that we will never offer Russell 2000, I'm just hoping this shines some light on why it isn't currently available. And I want to insure people that we understand the role the Russell 2000 plays in Gary's teachings and will continue looking at ways to provide it in the future.

Regards,
Michael

Michael,

Thank you for the quick response. I signed back in to formally retract my last post. My opinion was based on trying to locate the first few symbols which seemed to take quite a bit of time. Once I got on a roll I discovered that quite a few are the same or similar variation of what we are used to seeing. Hope you don't mind me posting a quick screen shot for those interested. Sub indexes are not in any logical order as this was brainstorming. I think this is a pretty good list :-)

Thank you NCT!

That is a good list. And if anyone is still having trouble finding anything, just let us know and we will help you out as soon as possible

Regards,
Michael

I think it must be reiterated.....Already a new version of the charts released with various changes/improvements. All of these from feed back that the Alchem team has been open to hearing from customers. Says a lot about the company in my opinion. Great job guys!

I agree! Very open and responsive to feedback. Even things I would have been willing to live with for a period of time have been updated in the new release.

Does anyone who has tried it happen to know the ports on which AlchemCharts communicates?

I'm hoping for ports 80 and 443 (unlike qcharts) so that it works through a corporate proxy.


Best regards

House, sorry for the delay. I pulled back a bit from the forum to focus more time and attention to my trading. I do not know the ports used for Alchem but I am sure if you reach out they are more than willing to answer.


As for anyone else that happens to read the thread Alchem is on their 3rd or 4th update since the initial release and plan on a releasing another iteration later this week that will improve performance. That said I made a conscious choice to cancel for now as there was not enough added value for me given the price, the time I have invested in TS (not to mention flexibility), and the newness of the platform. I have been involved in several technology rollouts in my career and almost all have some opportunities that need to be vetted out in their infancy. Alchem seems to be very attentive, eager to listen, and responsive. I will try again later but for now I am perfectly content with TS. I spoke to a few other students over the weekend and discovered that some felt the same way. I think the bottom line is that everyone must decide what is the best solution for themselves.

May you all have a very prosperous New Year!

NCT

Hi all,

Sorry to bump this thread, but I have a couple Q's.

I took GW's class a few times in the mid-late 2000's. I traded for a while, moved to NY and let it fall by the wayside.

I've tiptoed back in and was hoping to find what parameters GW suggests now and or any major thought/changes to the basics he used to teach.
Perhaps that's asking for too much info, but at least a little help with setting up charts would be great. I see that folks feel that QCharts have become somewhat futile - any suggestions on new charting system? Alchem seems a bit too expensive for me at the moment and I'm thinking of something a little more basic that I can set up myself.

Hope that this gets out to you all with it being such an old thread!

Thanks,

BB

Hi,

Many here are using TOS (ThinkOrSwim) because it is FREE, and you can get the same indicators that are needed on Qcharts. Qcharts is dying slowly, and even Gary says, that when it's dead he is going to move over to AlchemCharts. You can setup TOS to be exactly the same as Qcharts, or AlchemCharts. Did I mention it was FREE! If you decide to fund your TOS account with 20 or 50 bucks you will get real-time charts and data on the paper money side. But that is not necessary.

All of the technical indicator settings are the same values as before, so nothing has changed there.


R

Man that's great info - wasn't fully expecting a reply! Thank you.

It has been quite a while for me though and I certainly plan on funding and then trading within the next few weeks (even though it's only "snack time"

So, I have to ask and hopefully you can remind/inform me about the actual indicators/parameters?

I do remember paying for QCharts for so long (even of course while not actually trading real money for over a year!), so the notion of having free charts is music to my ears.

Thanks in advance,

BB