Gene, James, Jim, Armin, et al:

To all of you who have picked up the discrepancy in my workshop, I owe an explanation. And, I'm happy that you called me on it because you highlight the need for a change. To give you some insight into the reason why it's the way it is, I would offer this explanation (not an excuse):

When we first created Take $tock and distinguished between the novice version and advanced version, the "preferred procedure," or "business model," as we chose to call it, was considered an advanced concept with which no one was willing to burden the newbies. They reserved education about it for students who were already well-grounded and experienced with the SSG.

For that reason and because, in the novice mode, there was no access to the variables that comprise the business model for anyone to tweak, we decided to limit the novice to only the choices that were taught to the novice in most chapter curricula. The consensus was that it would be confusing and wrong to try to explain this procedure at that point in their education. This also resulted in leaving the business model out of the first edition of Take Stock: A Roadmap to Profiting from your First Walk down Wall Street until the last chapter ("Finer Points and Fudge Factors").  

In the advanced mode, of course, with users having the ability to access the variables and change them (and presumably being well enough educated to understand what it was all about), we made the selection of one or the other earnings calculation available and then defaulted to the lower.

I later changed my mind, deciding that there was really no reason to defer that education for new people. Offered with some clarity, it fit right in with the discussion of the income statement items in the mainstream concepts. And, for that reason, it appears much earlier, in its logical sequence, in the second edition of the book.

I lost track of that issue in the recent work on the program and never offered the suggestion that the novice version (which is what is now on-line) be corrected to make that choice. But I should have. So, mea culpa.

As of this moment, I will go on record as suggesting to ICLUBcentral that they make that correction to provide for the most conservative of the calculations, even without being able to access the choices. Because it is visible on the TSSW worksheet, and because it appears with something of an explanation in the text on that worksheet, my reservations about confusing the newbie are overridden by concern for folks like you who are likely to be confused by the apparent error.

Thanks for your vigilance. Here's the first test to see how quickly you get a response to your "design" effort.

Theresa:

Yes, I'm afraid you're right. The desktop version permits this "shortcut" but not so with the on-line version....yet. We'll see if it's something easily do-able and, if it is, it will be changed for you.

...just a follow-up to Theresa's note and my response:

I checked with folks who are responsible for Take $tock engineering and found out that "fixing" this is not a trivial matter but would entail considerable change.

The reason for it is that this novice version is constructed using a "frame" format [the frame is the blue portion of the program that is on the left and which contains the field for entering the ticker symbol. The program was initially set up to allow you to either hit [Enter] or the "Retrieve" button; but, because of the fact that the main body of the program must download as a different time than the frame, hitting the [Enter] key interfered with the mechanism on the main part of the page and had to be disabled.

You'll be happy to know that this will be changed in the "Advanced" version and it will no longer be a problem.

In any event, as an early test of the responsiveness of ICLUBcentral to requests, this at least showed them to be responsive, even though the outcome wasn't as we might have preferred.

I believe the other issue; i.e., the automatic selection of the low earnings value, will be done soon.

Armin:

Yup. This was the first test of the "new responsiveness" and I'm pleased to see that it was just what it should be.

There is a little problem remaining in that the value obtained from the business model will be rounded to two decimal places for display on the front of the form. But the unrounded value will be used to calculate the high and average price and will appear to be just a bit different from what the result would be should the displayed numbers be used in the calculation. Unfortunately, the difference is too much to ignore, or we could multiply out the rounded values and then it wouldn't raise someone's eyebrows. But, I feel comfortable defending the use of the unrounded values for that calculation.

That was a good call, to begin with and we thank you.