Introducing Stock Rover V8 - Part I

Introduction

Stock Rover is pleased to announce the release of V8. The new release will be available on Monday, May 24th. The release is automatic. All users who log into Stock Rover on or after May 24th will automatically be running the new release.

V8 has a number of new features and design changes that we think will make using Stock Rover even more productive and rewarding. There are a fair number of changes, so I have broken this blog into two parts. This is part 1. Let’s dive in and take a look.

Improved Readability

We have used a larger and cleaner font and more contrasty colors to give V8 more pop. It should be easier to read and allow for faster digestion of Stock Rover data. And for good measure we updated our logo. We hope you like it.

The Grey Selector Menu

The first and most noticeable change is to the Grey Selector menu on the left. The menu has actually been simplified a bit in that it has fewer items than the V7 menu. This creates room for a cool new feature called Bookmarks, which is described in the next section. A screenshot of the new menu is shown below.

The actual changes to the V8 menu vs V7 are as follows. A minor change is the word Navigation has been replaced by Collections. The wording change signifies that there has been a change to Screeners, Portfolios and Watchlists, all of which are grouped under Collections.

In V7, selecting Screeners, Portfolios or Watchlists changed the navigation for easy selection of a particular screener, portfolio or watchlist to display in the table. In V8, selecting Screeners, Portfolios or Watchlists brings you to a new management window for Screeners, Portfolios and Watchlists that allows you do everything from one central location. This is covered in detail in Part II of this blog post series.

We have also shortened the menu by dropping all of the items under Portfolio Tools. These are now all conveniently accessible from the top of the new Portfolio Management window, as shown below.

Bookmarks

A great new feature in Stock Rover is Bookmarks. This is a feature I absolutely love and I think you will as well. It allows you to customize the Grey Selector menu with the parts of Stock Rover that you use most often and want quick access to. It is super easy to use. I’ll show what it can do by way of example.

Let’s suppose you use the Future Income feature of Stock Rover a lot. Note this is one of the items that was removed from the grey selector menu in V8. To add it as a bookmark, go to Future Income by clicking on Portfolios in the Grey Selector menus and then clicking on Future Income in the top row of buttons, as shown below, or by clicking from the quick links, as highlighted below.

This brings up the Future Income display, as shown below.

Then you can add the bookmark to Stock Rover in one of two ways. You can click on the star next to your username in the upper right hand corner of Stock Rover, as shown below.

Or you can click on My Bookmarks in the grey selector menu, as shown below.

Either way you get the bookmarks dialog window, where you can add the new bookmark, as show below. You can also rearrange bookmarks, rename bookmarks or remove bookmarks from this window.

Now the Bookmarks section has Future Income added as if it were built into the product, as shown below.

One of the cool things about Bookmarks is that in certain situations, they are context aware. For example, suppose that Google is your biggest position and you want to check in on it on a regular basis by looking at its chart. Your preferred chart is to look back 6 months and to look at the price chart in Candlestick mode. You also want to see the Average True Range chart. You set that up as follows in charting:

Then you just bookmark it.

Now it is on the Grey Selector menu for easy access, as shown below.

As I previously mentioned, to make room for Bookmarks, we removed some of the Portfolio tools from the grey selector menu, they are available in the Portfolio Management Window, reached by selecting Portfolios from the grey selector menu.

We think that once you get familiar with Bookmarks, you will find them to be an incredible time saver, and will make the use of Stock Rover a much more customized experience for you.

New Charts

We have made some major improvements to charts. We added five new charts. There are three new technical charts and two new valuation charts. The three new technical charts are:

• Average True Range
• On Balance Volume
• Stochastic Oscillator

They can be found under the Technicals drop down, as shown below.

We have also added two very cool valuation charts that will help you understand a stock’s valuation across multiple dimensions relative to its historical range. These two new valuation charts are found under the valuation drop down shown below. The image below shows the new historical range chart, which is the lower of the two charts.

The Historical Range chart (shown above) allows you to select from one of 7 key metrics:

• Price to Earnings
• Price to Book
• Price to Sales
• Price to Cash Flow
• Price to Free Cash Flow
• EV/EBDITA
• Dividend Yield

The metric is value is plotted over time relative to its historical range. The historical range is user selectable at 1 year, 2 years or 3 years. The graph background is colored to show regions under valuation (green), normal valuation (white) and over valuation (red). Clicking on the hamburger, which are the three horizontal lines highlighted in the upper right hand corner of the historical range chart, shown below, allows you select different metrics to graph and different trailing time periods.

The second valuation chart is the Football Field chart, which shows you eight key valuation metrics all together. With the Football Field graph, the saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words” certainly holds true here. It makes for quite a powerful presentation of valuation data as you can see below looking at Microsoft (MSFT) current valuation metrics (blue vertical line) vs. its one year range.

More Flexible Chart Management

In addition to the five new charts, chart management in Stock Rover has become simpler and more flexible. Every chart has the same chart control set in its upper right corner. Each icon within the chart control set allows for a different management operation.

Moving left to right, the hamburger (3 horizontal stripes) allows you to manage the settings for the chart. For example for the Historical Range valuation chart, you can pick the metric to chart and the length of the trailing period. For the Stochastic Oscillator, you can change which lines to display, %K, %D or both.

The Up and Down arrows allow you to move the chart up and down relative to the other charts. Note if the chart is at the top, the up arrow doesn’t render, and likewise, if the chart is at the bottom, the down arrow will not render.

The Line icon allows you to minimize the chart without closing it. In the screenshot below you can see that the Average True Range chart is minimized and is between the Football Field chart and the Stochastic Oscillator chart. To get the Average True Range chart back, you would click on the overlapping window, as highlighted below.

The Window icon allows you to maximize the chart, as shown below. Here you see the Average True Range chart using all of the chart window. To return the chart back to its normal size, click on the overlapping window, as highlighted below.

The ability to flexibly configure and manipulate charts should make using the Stock Rover charting facility a much more productive and rewarding endeavor.

What’s Covered in Part 2

In this blog post, I covered some of the new features in Stock Rover V8. In the next blog post I will cover the remainder of the features, which focus on the new Screener, Portfolio and Watchlist managers. When the new release becomes available on May 24th, you can click on Screeners, Portfolios or Watchlists in the grey selector menu on the left to see them in action.

Summary

In V8, we have added a number of new features and made some important design changes to Stock Rover that we believe will add to the power, ease of use and enjoyment of doing investment research with Stock Rover. We hope that you find Stock Rover V8 to be a major step forward for the product.

Please check out Part 2 of this blog post set to learn what else is new in Stock Rover V8.