Introduction

Welcome to AutoShare, an application that will help you maximize the profits you make from stock markets around the world. The software comes pre-loaded with historical prices for the DJIA (Dow Jones) and FTSE 100 indices and their constituent shares, but once you subscribe, you can download and update share prices from a wide range of indices.

You can use share price data in the following ways.

• Display graphs of share price against time, which you can print, save as files, or copy to the clipboard.
• Examine prices in more detail with a spreadsheet of share prices.
• Set up moving averages for displaying on the share price graph and for producing lists of shares whose moving averages have crossed. The relative position of a share’s moving averages can be an indication to buy or sell.
• Discover which shares have risen or fallen over a particular period of time, and by how much. A share that has risen or fallen rapidly may have become respectively overbought or oversold, due to the momentum inherent in share price movements. In combination with fundamental information about a company, you may want to consider buying an oversold share or selling an overbought one.
• Obtain lists of shares whose price is within a particular percentage of its high or low in the last specified period. Again, such shares may have been respectively overbought or oversold.
• Find out which shares have been delisted from their stock market index, and which have been recently added.
• Create portfolios of shares you have bought or are considering buying, so you can easily monitor their price movements and any profits made.
• Perform backtests, or simulations of trading in the past, to see how particular settings would have fared historically.

AutoShare achieves simplicity by concentrating on the most popular and successful technical analysis technique: the moving average crossover. By using the backtest facility, you will discover for example that the optimal setting for trading the DJIA over the last 107 years would have produced profits of more than 5E9% (50,000,000,000,000%), an annual average return of 18% with full re-investment of profits. Over the same period, a buy and hold strategy would have returned a profit of just 27,500% or a 5.3% annual average. At these levels, good money management is essential to ensure that profits are retained for reinvestment, making the most of the miracle of compound interest. In practice this means paying for transactions fees and capital gains taxes out of a separate pool of money.