For Gold and Platinum members on the Slope of Hope, SlopeCharts lets you create completely new financial instruments with the components of your choice. You can gather together as many as 100 different equity symbols (including ETFs) to represent anything you like (such as a sector or a particular portion of the market), and our servers will create the data for you and let you chart your creation.
To access this feature, choose MetaSymbols from the Tools menu of SlopeCharts.
When you do this, you will be presented with a dialog box that will let you create, edit, share, or load MetaSymbols.
Creating and editing a MetaSymbol is very easy. All you need to do is give it a name, describe its purpose, and define at least two symbols which are its components. You can have anywhere from 2 to 100 different symbols.
For example, if I wanted to create a symbol to represent businesses related to artificial intelligence, I might come up with a new symbol AI, give it a brief description, and start giving it ticker symbols of companies in that industry.
When I am done with my creation, I can click Save, and the servers will immediately start fetching and processing that data. In a few moments, it will be ready for you to chart, or you can continue on and make another MetaSymbol.
A huge time-saver when creating a MetaSymbol is to use a text file of ticker symbols instead of typing in the symbols one at a time. For example, perhaps you have labeled many of your ticker symbols in SlopeCharts, and you want to use a label to create a new MetaSymbol. In this instance, suppose we want to create a symbol to represent car companies, so we find the label in SlopeCharts called “Auto-Related” and choose it.
The filtering is done, which means when we use the Export feature, it will export those specific tickers only, and not the entirety of the watch list.
Now we have a text file we can use to import. (You could just as easily type in the symbols in a text file and save it to accomplish the same thing). Just drag-and-drop the file into the MetaSymbol dialog box, and all those symbols will be loaded for you. If you prefer, you can load the file by way of another dialog box just by clicking inside the “Click or Drop Text File” zone.
Now you can Save as you normally would. This feature makes it possible to make even a very complex MetaSymbol with up to one hundred tickers take only a few moments to create.
When you created any MetaSymbol, it is automatically made available to the other Gold and Platinum members. They cannot alter your symbol, but they can look at the chart. The eyeball icon in the dialog box lets you control whether a symbol is shared or not shared.
If for any reason you would prefer keeping your MetaSymbol only for your own use and viewing, just click the eyeball icon, and a line will go through it, indicating that no one else can see your creation.
For any symbol, you can point to it with your cursor and see a scrollable, alphabetized list of its component symbols.
You can also type any text into the box shown to filter all the MetaSymbols, which can save you plenty of time if you are looking for something specific.
Here is a specific example of how a MetaSymbol can provide insight into the markets that simply isn’t otherwise possible.
The popular ETF symbol QQQ represents the most important 100 stocks of the NASDAQ market. Let us suppose we believe the very largest of those stocks have had an outsized effect on the market’s performance, and we want to see if there’s been a time in the past when the NASDAQ 93 (so to speak) different substantially from the NASDAQ 100. We therefore take a list of the 100 ticker symbols of the 100 components and excise the top 7 of them.
We create a new symbol called NASDAQSMALL, which has the exact same components of the regular QQQ but without the very largest, multi-trillion dollar companies. We then use the Layered Chart feature in SlopeCharts to overlay these two, and we use the Spread function to see how they behave compared to each other.
As you can see, whereas these two items used to be exceptionally tightly correlated, in recent months a gargantuan spread has developed between the two of them, suggesting that the very largest of the components are doing all the heavy lifting.
When we take a longer view of these same items, we discover that there was an instance a few years prior in which the exact same phenomenon was taking place. There is no assurance that the outcome which followed that instance will be the same this time, but it is well worth noting.