Dow Jones US Indices & related

alekine53

Hello. My registration was long overdue. Congrats on your wonderful community and I promise I'll do my best to be a fruitful part of it!!

My issue:
1. I've only been trading for the past 6 months, and I trade Energy stocks. I've been an Extra-RT Stockcharts.com user for a year and a Pro user for the past 2 months. I also recently stopped using a limited # of 20 instruments to operate and for the past week I have tried to get acquainted with different market taxonomies so I can use a group-average top-down approach to stock selection. It makes it possible for me to follow more than 20 issues and still have my technical perspective intact. I need coverage of the entire sector though. That's what makes it worth it. (Jump to 2. if you don't like reading) As I read along I found GICS to be what I needed in theory 'cause of the market-based approach but old Dow Jones US Indices were easily more readily available on the website, and probably in general. Now, as I moved to the specifics I found old Dow Jones Indices had changed from ICB (Industry Classification Bench) to GICS, and to my surprise no DJ US Alternative Energy Sector (Industry Group if speaking in GICS) neither its sub-sectors US Renewable Energy Equip. and Alternative Fuels indices were being calculated. That was fine. It made sense if they were changing to GICS. DJ US Total Stock Market Indices exist for them though but hardly any of the energy ones are on stockcharts (only US Total Stock Market Renewable Energy Equip. sub-sector and US Total Stock Market Oil & Gas super-sector) and no volume which makes everything inconsistent again for me. FINE!!!! At that point I was determined to use my extra 13 bucks of customer service (:S) to relief the headaches. Maybe if I changed my entire index set and I follow some of the structures on the site I'll be able to stay away of having to make so many Excel indices and learning hundreds of taxonomy definitions like I worked as S&P. Except for the fact that a DJ index name was changed in a matter of hours (that they did pretty fast), Customer service was worthless. Fast, but worthless. Answers were rhetorically deviated, and technically incorrect. And from this last guy named Cole Johnson I got stuff like this:

Me: "Thanks for your support. (blah blah) I'd like to know more about the sector-industry classification which is used to provide scanning constants. Is there an article you can refer me to? Also, I'd like to know how to scan for Alternative Fuels stocks and Alternative Electricity. I don't seem to find it. Thanks again."

Cole: "Our Sector classifications are based on the S&P Sector SPDRs. Our Industry classifications are based on the Dow Jones Industry Indexes. We support the "Renewable Energy Equipment" industry in our Scan Engine. To use it, add the following to your scan: and [group is RenewableEnergyEquipment]"

WHAT?!

Me: "Hi. Thanks for your prompt response. What I see there are ICB (Dow Jones?) subsectors and I'm asking for Alternative Fuels (from your Energy Sector) and Alternative Electricity (from the Utilities sector). They are on the ICB latest structural review but they are missing entirely from the list. Are you saying these 2 subindustries are included in the Renewable Energy Equip.? Thanks"

Cole: "I'm not saying anything other that we have that Renewable Energy Equipment industry. I don't see anything else in our list beyond that."

WHAAAT?!!

The end.

Can somebody help me?

2. I need a consistent way to monitor energy stocks and their respective averages without leaving entire chunks of the sector out on the data vendor's command and without going to the overly tanned dudes are S&P to talk about rent money. Any help would be appreciated. I just need energy stocks in a stockcharts list, and indices composed of all of them or their leaders, but covering them all. All archives I've study on the subject are readily available from me if somebody wants to help me.

Thanks for reading through. I truly apologize for my english if it caused you trouble.

markd

I think support's answer was correct. But it might be more accurate to say that while they use the DowJones classification system as a model for the SC system, they do not necessarily support all of the DJ system in every detail.

If you know the ticker symbols of any stocks that DJ classifies in those groups, you could see whether SC support those symbols at all, and if so, whether they classify them into other groups or leave them unclassified.

If you have found a list of stocks that on the DJ site that they include in each index, the obvious solution is to create your own list, but get the index elsewhere.

Or send a note to SC support requesting inclusion of those indices as symbols, even if they don't classify stocks into a group. They do say they add symbols when requested if they can.

alekine53

Thanks for your reply, Mark. I truly appreciate any support on this.

1st: Related to CS: With all due respect, there is no "more accurate" answer. It wasn't a philosophical question to customer support. It's either right or it isn't. It is WRONG!! They answered something else!! They didn't even get the names right. There is no "Dow Jones classification" nor are there any Dow Jones Industry Indices. They are called ICB sub-sectors (Dow Jones US Sector Indices in general, website ref.) and that's what more closely matches what stockcharts has. And, as it is more than obvious, they seemed reluctant to say anything at all. (I have more emails showing same pattern) Plus, no reference or site link to what they use and how to define it? really?

2nd: Dow Jones US Indices are structured as ICB but calculated and composed using GICS since February, 2014 (website ref). Website has no list of stocks composing any one index. Only updates. Lists are for S&P customers, which I don't want to be. That's why I pay 50USD to a vendor.

3rd and moving past conceptual problems: I just found a website called Bigcharts that has ICB industries, super-sectors, sectors and sub-sectors nicely laid down with each respective companies list. They called them Sectors and industries but what the hell, I found something. What is really calling my attention just now: Alternative Energy Sector link is BROKEN with all its subsectors. WHAAAT??!!! freaky enough there is no DJ US indices whatsoever for those.

CAN SOMEBODY PLEASE EXPLAIN THIS TO ME? It is probably a silly thing concerning the taxonomy but as long as I don't know what's going on (which S&P Dow Jones doesn't explain) or I don't have a working alternative, it is breaking my mind into pieces.

Thanks for reading through Mark.

alekine53

Indices have been requested since problem first appeared. It was noted that some sort of a weighted indices requests list is being maintained by stockcharts. And "every once in a while" they pick the one with more requests and make it available.

markd

Well, MarketWatch runs BigCharts and DowJones owns MarketWatch. You are correct that the Alternative Fuels link on BigCharts goes to page not found. That suggests that DowJones is not supporting this index either. Maybe because it's been determined obsolete, or they haven't completed it. So it's no surprise that StockCharts doesn't support it if they take their structure from DowJones. So I think your problem is with DowJones.

alekine53

Thanks for your comments, Mark. Nice ownership tip to follow some trails on checking about this stuff.

Yes, from the beginning it shows I'm missing some Dow Jones related info. But I don't pay them money. I do pay money to one of their vendors Stockcharts.com, they get info relating all these indices they pay money for and I could get a simple explanation on why is there supposedly production oriented sub-sectors (ICB, Dow Jones) under market oriented sectors (GICS, Energy instead of Oil & Gas) but they either answer it as always "We support all market energy flavors. Please don't forget to check with the person next to you." or they send me here. wtf . So I'm here.

By the way, I registered on Marketwatch, painful as is that website to browse and found this:
http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/industry/?bcind_ind=bc_all&bcind_period=3mo
No Alternative Energy here either. So it must be the change to GICS. But no Renewable Electricity sub-industry, for example. I'm giving S&P Dow Jones a shot and i'll try to get some info about this. I'll post it when i get it.

Thanks Mark.

markd

Another site you might be interested in for fundamental information is finviz.com. Charting is minimal but scanning for fundamentals characteristics, if you are interested in those, is pretty good. They have a completely different classification method from DowJones/S&P, and there is no breakout for alternative energy that I could find, but you may still find it useful.

P.S. I looked up stocks on SC with "solar" in their name but not classified into renewable energy equipment (and not PINKs, just NASD and NYSE), and then look up how other sites classified them. So JASO on Yahoo is Semiconductor-Specialized. So is SEDG. So is VSLR. So maybe the alternative energy classification concept is not catching on with the market in general.

alekine53

There is no Energy Sector on Yahoo, Mark. http://biz.yahoo.com/p/s_conameu.html
For instance, SolarCity Corp. shows in Semiconductors but it shows as Alternative Fuels on Marketwatch. So do BlueFire and many others. Some of these have no classification at all on stockcharts.com

markd

Right. Yahoo (and Finviz, looks like they use the same system) uses a different classification system that put oil and gas stocks in Basic Materials and solar stocks in Semiconductors - Specialized. Just a different way of looking at the world.

alekine53

Yes, certainly. Another one we have very little documentation of.

markd

Here's a ETF symbol that might substitute as an index for alternative energy stocks:

PBD - Powershares Global Clean Energy

elitepdf.com/read.php?url=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5pbnZlc2NvcG93ZXJzaGFyZXMuY29tL3BkZi9QLVBCRC1QQy0xLnBkZg==

Just a suggestion.

alekine53

I don't use those but thanks.