Understanding categories

AmiBroker has an ability to assign symbols to different categories allowing you (when properly set up) to narrow your analysis searches to the symbols meeting certain selection criteria (thanks to Filter feature available in Quick Review and Automatic Analysis windows). The initial set up of categories may be a little bit complicated especially when you want to track several thousands symbols.

Categories show up in Symbols window. First and foremost thing to remember is categories do NOT work like folders and Workspace window does NOT work like Windows Explorer.

The difference is fundamental. In the Windows Explorer file appears (usually) only once in the given tree leaf.
In the symbol tree given symbol shows up multiple times because it appears in every category leaf to which it belongs to even if this is the same symbol and only it exists only as single entity.

Symbols window is divided into three parts:
a) search box
b) category tree
c) symbol list

The search box allows to perform full text searches (including wildcard matching) against symbol and full name within selected category. So for example if you select "Technology" sector and type A* (letter 'A' and wildcard character *) the symbol list will show all symbols belonging to Technology sector with symbol or full name beginning with letter 'A'. Another example would be tping *-A0-FX - this will return all forex symbols on eSignal database (those ending with -A0-FX substring).

The category tree (see the picture) shows different kind of categories.

The symbol list (bottom part) shows the list of symbols belonging to selected category. The symbol list can be sorted by symbol or by full name. To sort just click on the header row of the list. Once you choose desired sorting order it will be kept for all subsequent category choices and searches. Also the order of columns can be changed so Full name column appears as first one. To re-arrange column, click on the column header, hold down the moust button and drag the column to desired location. Then release mouse button.

Single symbol belongs to MANY categories at the same time. For example AAPL (Apple Inc.) will belong to:

  • Stocks group category
  • Nasdaq market category
  • Information sector category
  • Comp-Computer Mfg industry category

and may also belong to several watch lists and favorites category. All at the same time. That's why one symbol will appear in many leaves of the workspace symbol tree. Now if you delete the SYMBOL it will of course disappear from ALL categories because you have deleted the symbol itself, not its assignment to category.

 

There are two types of categories:

  1. with mutualy exclusive membership: groups, markets, sectors/industries, GICS - it means that symbol must belong to single group, single market and single sector/industry at a time. You can move the symbol from one group/market/sector/industry to another but you can not remove this assignment - you should create "Unassigned" group/market/sector/industry instead and move 'unassigned' symbols there.
  2. with free membership: watch lists/favorites/indexes- it means that a symbol may belong to ANY number (including zero) of watch lists (and to favorite/index category too). In this case you can remove this assignment by Watch List->Remove

    Watch lists are covered in detail in the User's Guide: Tutorial: Working with Watch Lists.

There is also one special category called "ALL" that shows up in the workspace symbol tree. It simply lists ALL symbols present in the database.

Working with sectors and industries

Basics - predefined sectors and industries

Now we will focus on setting up sectors and industries and assigning the symbols to them. First let me discuss some basic ideas.

AmiBroker comes with an example Dow Jones Industrials database holding all 30 components of this world's most famous market average. They are assigned to predefined sectors and industries. These sectors and industries are exactly the same as used on Yahoo finance site and here is a table which shows them all:

Sector Industry
Basic Materials  (0) Chemical Manufacturing
Chemicals - Plastics & Rubber
Containers & Packaging
Fabricated Plastic & Rubber
Forestry & Wood Products
Gold & Silver
Iron & Steel
Metal Mining
Misc. Fabricated Products
Non-Metallic Mining
Paper & Paper Products
Capital Goods (1) Aerospace & Defense
Constr. - Supplies & Fixtures
Constr. & Agric. Machinery
Construction - Raw Materials
Construction Services
Misc. Capital Goods
Mobile Homes & RVs
Conglomerates (2) Conglomerates
Consumer Cyclical (3) Apparel/Accessories
Appliance & Tool
Audio & Video Equipment
Auto & Truck Manufacturers
Auto & Truck Parts
Footwear
Furniture & Fixtures
Jewelry & Silverware
Photography
Recreational Products
Textiles - Non Apparel
Tires
Consumer/Non-Cyclical (4) Beverages (Alcoholic)
Beverages (Non-Alcoholic)
Crops
Fish/Livestock
Food Processing
Office Supplies
Personal & Household Prods.
Tobacco
Energy (5) Coal
Oil & Gas - Integrated
Oil & Gas Operations
Oil Well Services & Equipment
Financial (6) Consumer Financial Services
Insurance (Accident & Health)
Insurance (Life)
Insurance (Miscellaneous)
Insurance (Prop. & Casualty)
Investment Services
Misc. Financial Services
Money Center Banks
Regional Banks
S&Ls/Savings Banks
Healthcare (7) Biotechnology & Drugs
Healthcare Facilities
Major Drugs
Medical Equipment & Supplies
Services (8) Advertising
Broadcasting & Cable TV
Business Services
Casinos & Gaming
Communications Services
Hotels & Motels
Motion Pictures
Personal Services
Printing & Publishing
Printing Services
Real Estate Operations
Recreational Activities
Rental & Leasing
Restaurants
Retail (Apparel)
Retail (Catalog & Mail Order)
Retail (Department & Discount)
Retail (Drugs)
Retail (Grocery)
Retail (Home Improvement)
Retail (Specialty)
Retail (Technology)
Schools
Security Systems & Services
Waste Management Services
Technology (9) Communications Equipment
Computer Hardware
Computer Networks
Computer Peripherals
Computer Services
Computer Storage Devices
Electronic Instruments & Controls
Office Equipment
Scientific & Technical Instr.
Semiconductors
Software & Programming
Transportation (10) Air Courier
Airline
Misc. Transportation
Railroads
Trucking
Water Transportation
Utilities (11) Electric Utilities
Natural Gas Utilities
Water Utilities

It is important to understand the difference between a sector and an industry: industries "belong" to sectors, for example: "Air Courier", "Airline", "Railroads", "Trucking" industries belong to "Transportation" sector. So if a symbol is assigned to given industry, it is "automatically" assigned also to the corresponding sector.

In the example DJIA database each stock is assigned to specific industry, for example GM (General Motors) is assigned to "Auto & Truck Manufacturers" industry, and this implicates that GM belongs to "Consumer/Cyclical" sector.

AmiBroker can handle up to 32 sectors and up to 256 industries.

How to assign symbol to the industry?

You can change the industry to which given symbol is assigned by using Window->Information dialog (Industry combo box)

or using Symbol->Organize Assignments.

The first method is fine if you want to change single symbol settings. The latter is better if you want to move multiple symbols from one category to another.

How to define your own sectors and industries

Please go to Symbol->Categories dialog, the last two tabs are "Sectors" and "Industries". First, switch to the "Sectors" tab and you will see the list of 32 sector names. You can now select the sector by clicking once on its name and edit the sector name by pressing ENTER or clicking "Edit name" button. Hit ENTER again to accept the name change.

After you renamed the sectors you can switch to the "Industries" tab. Similarly to the previous tab you can select the industry in the list and edit its name in the same manner. Here you can also assign the industry to the sector using "Sector" combo. Just select the sector to which you want to assign currently selected industry.

Where sector and industry information is stored?

Generally speaking this information is stored in AmiBroker database. The sector and industry names and settings are stored in the broker.workspace file (in the workspace folder), symbol data files hold only the information about the assignment of the symbol to given industry (IndustryID).

When you create a new workspace (a database) AmiBroker sets up your industries and sectors according to the templates stored in the "broker.sectors" and "broker.industries" files. These are simple text files that could be edited with plain text editor (such as Notepad). These files could be also used for quick, automatic setup of the sectors and industries. AmiBroker comes with predefined broker.sectors and broker.industries that follow described above convention (see the table). You can rewrite broker.sectors and broker.industries files to define your own default scheme. So, "broker.sectors" and "broker.industries" files are used as a template when creating new workspace. Once workspace is created these files are not taken into consideration. In this way you may have different categories in each workspace. If you want AmiBroker to load them into already existing workspace please delete broker.workspace file before opening the workspace. If you then open the workspace AmiBroker will read broker.sectors and broker.industries.

The layout of broker.sectors file is very simple: it is plain text file holding sector names written line by line as shown below:

Basic Materials
Capital Goods
Conglomerates
Consumer Cyclical
Consumer/Non-Cyclical
Energy
Financial
Healthcare
Services
Technology
Transportation
Utilities

The layout of broker.industries is similar, but in addition to industry names there is a number at the beginning of each line:

8 Advertising
1 Aerospace & Defense
10 Air Courier
10 Airline
3 Apparel/Accessories
3 Appliance & Tool
3 Audio & Video Equipment
3 Auto & Truck Manufacturers
3 Auto & Truck Parts
4 Beverages (Alcoholic)
4 Beverages (Non-Alcoholic)
7 Biotechnology & Drugs
8 Broadcasting & Cable TV
8 Business Services
8 Casinos & Gaming
0 Chemical Manufacturing
0 Chemicals - Plastics & Rubber
5 Coal
9 Communications Equipment

The numbers at front of industry names are "Sector IDs". Those numbers decide to which sector given industry belongs to. Because several industries may belong to one sector - you may need to put the same number for sector Id. Sector IDs are zero based, which means that 0 refers to the first line (sector name) of "broker.sectors" file, while 7 refers to the eighth line of this file. In the example above: "Advertising" industry belongs to "Services" sector, while "Aerospace & Defence" industry belongs to "Capital Goods" sector.

If you don't want to setup detailed industry information and want assign symbols only to sectors you can define one-to-one relationship between first 32 industries so they will be equivalent to sectors. Using the broker.sectors as show earlier in this article 1-1 broker.industries file would look like:

0 Basic Materials
1 Capital Goods
2 Conglomerates
3 Consumer Cyclical
4 Consumer/Non-Cyclical
5 Energy
6 Financial
7 Healthcare
8 Services
9 Technology
10 Transportation
11 Utilities

Note that this file is essentially the same as broker.sectors with the only difference that we have consecutive numbers prepended to each line. Using this kind of setup setting the industry will be equivalent to setting the sector.

Making it automatic

As described above symbol and industries names and relationship can be easily set up quickly using "broker.sectors" and "broker.industries" files. It will save some work needed otherwise to enter this information in Symbol->Categories window.

Unfortunately a lot more work is needed to assign all symbols to the industries even using Symbol->Organize Assignments dialog.

Fortunatelly there is a way to setup and update the database automatically.

In pre-5.60 version it still required scripting and lots of work (see 4th issue of AmiBroker Tips newsletter) but version 5.60 brings completely new ways to setup the database automatically.

The improved ASCII importer in v5.60 allows to import symbols, sectors and industry names and build complete database in just one step.

Let us say that we have CSV file that looks as follows:
"DDD","3D Systems Corporation","Technology","Computer Software: Prepackaged Software"
"MMM","3M Company","Health Care","Medical/Dental Instruments"
"SVN","7 Days Group Holdings Limited","Consumer Services","Hotels/Resorts"
"AHC","A.H. Belo Corporation","Consumer Services","Newspapers/Magazines"
"AIR","AAR Corp.","Capital Goods","Aerospace"
"AAN","Aaron's, Inc.","Technology","Diversified Commercial Services"

Now we can import it into AmiBroker and automatically setup all sectors and industries using this format definition

$FORMAT Ticker, FullName,SectorName,IndustryName
$SEPARATOR ,
$AUTOADD 1
$NOQUOTES 1
$OVERWRITE 1
$CLEANSECTORS 1
$SORTSECTORS 1

The last two commands ($CLEANSECTORS and $SORTSECTORS) instruct AmiBroker to clean (wipe) existing sector/industry names before importing and sort newly imported sectors after importing so they appear alphabetically

AmiBroker will read such ASCII file one-by one, then it will check whenever given sector name/industry name already exists, if not - it will create new sector/industry. Then it will assign given symbol to specified sector/industry.

The result will be a database with new sector/industry structure being set up and symbols assigned to proper sectors and industries.

Described functionality is used to implement Tools->Update US symbol list and categories tool.

One-click "Update US symbol list and categories"

Automatic setup and update of US stock database is available from Tools->Update US symbol list and categories menu. This is implemented using new #import command and new ASCII importer commands described above.

The command downloads symbol, sector and industry list from amibroker.com web site and create or update current database with stocks listed on NYSE, Nasdaq and AMEX. It also creates sector and industry structure and assigns stocks to proper industries.

CAVEAT: Be aware that using this tool will WIPE (delete) any existing sectors/industries and replace them with the ones imported automatically.

Note about GICS

GICS stands for Global Industry Classification Standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Industry_Classification_Standard).

AmiBroker allows also GICS 4-level classification system, but demo database does not have symbols classified according to that standard. You can find GICS classification codes in GICS.txt file inside AmiBroker folder.

Note about ICB

ICB stands for Industry Classification Benchmark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Classification_Benchmark).

AmiBroker allows also ICB 4-level classification system, but demo database does not have symbols classified according to that standard. You can find ICB classification codes in ICB.txt file inside AmiBroker folder.