The collapse of Zenith Trading & Holding Corporation came roughly five years ago just as it hit its peak and its website was flourishing. Zenith’s primary interest was in predicting financial markets, not in computer programming. At that time technological and changes in the brokerage industry were mitigating and increasing to a level threatening the total destruction of our systems at that time. At that time, insofar as programming was concerned, Zenith’s policy aimed at what we called the “lowest common denominator.” This was an attempt to create a site that would be accessible by browsers and operating systems from the previous century. This policy, to try to avoid the need for operating system “updates” continues to this day, although we were forced to concede at least up to Windows 7, it would be unavoidable to affect change.

So, the primary culprit in bringing us down was Microsoft, a most-hated company that refuses to support its legacy operating systems, its legacy software that operated on those systems, and just about everything to do with that greedy notion that users were only lease holders of its buggy newer systems that it expected the public to debug for them with continual updates. We got a message one day that to continue to use Microsoft software on our computers, we would need a new “product key” which Microsoft refused to supply. Almost all of the software we had running would not run on Microsoft newer systems without extensive modifications. Of course, Microsoft wasn’t the only software manufacturer employing this trick, and we hear Apple-users suffer the same fate, although we have no way to verify this. Basically all manufacturers like Cisco, Oracle, or organizations like the European Computer Manufacturers Association or the World Wide Web Consortium. And adding to this were hardware changes making unavailable parts we needed for legacy systems, most notably the change from IDE hard drives to SATA and SSD drives so as our hardware began to fail, including problems with aging capacitors on motherboards, we were looking at an overwhelming (for us., at least) reorganization. But this wasn’t the only looming threat. The whole financial industry was changing for the worse. This was less obvious in stocks, but very obvious in commodities. Zenith’s policy was to make use of software and information that was provided freely on the Internet as much as possible, and keep any subscription fees that it or its users might need as little as possible. Much of the “free software” and “free information” which existed five years began to disappear rapidly. Creators of this stuff began to die off rapidly or change their sites from “free” to “fee.” We felt part of our job was to keep their legacy software running on newer systems, but that proved nearly impossible.

Then there was the failure of a bunch of major commodity trading brokerage houses, and the free stuff they formerly provided. We were forced to consolidate brokerage contacts into smaller and smaller opportunities as mergers and buyouts kept consolidating the industry until there are now only a few major commodity brokerages left. But one of the worst developments was the imposition of the ICE, the Intercontinental Exchange. New York Board of Trade (NYBOT), Acquired: 2007, and the big ones for softs. Including: Coffee, Sugar & Cocoa Exchange (CSCE) New York Cotton Exchange (NYCE) FINEX (Financial Instruments Exchange) It immediately in a s how of pure greed persecuted smaller traders out of the markets by raising its various fees to outrageous levels and reducing services and forcing many remaining commodity brokerage houses not to offer its products along with what they still offered from the Chicago Mercantile and Board of Trade Exchanges.

Then came a wave of brokerage companies buying up and taking off the market completely much of the free software that formerly existed. We can’t even remember the names of all of these, but one of the most serious acquisitions was the one that took Medved Quotetracker off the market and turned it into the disastrous substitute, “Think or Swim”. Then even that entire brokerage was meged into Charles Scwab,, along with Options Express, as Schwab bought up our primary sources and service organizations replacing them with a cheap and entirely inadequate commodities trading offering that excluded the ICE altogether. Famous systems creators like Welles Wilder passed away while others like John Bollinger or Tomasz Janeczko changed their websites from free to fee.

Sites like “Marketbrowser” (formerly free) became ineffective due to poor programming, and we felt that particular one was vital for tracking stocks, the loss of which forced increased time required taking away from that left for commodities. The list of changes goes on and on…these were only a few examples of what was killing us. One of the biggest commodity futures losses was when k”The Hightower Report” was no longer offered free access and switched to subscription fees.

Other software companies like Nivrana and Metastock have continued to offer reasonable support for their legacy systems and we plan to continue using them.

We also lost our most profitable trading software of all, OptionVue trading software, formerly offered by its inventor, Len Yates. Corporate data shows OptionVue Systems International was acquired on January 2, 2019. In user forums, traders note that “Brian (the new owner)” took over, and Len Yates left the company after he sold it. Later on, OptionVue itself was shut down around May 2023, with users being told the software would stop functioning once certain backend services were terminated. The OptionVue software would no longer run on Microsoft’s newer operating systems or their unsupported “leased” older systems for reasons explained earlier. That was the final blow to our former commodities operations, which we hope now to try to revive at least in some shadow of its former self. Options trading would be a central feature of this newer site if we can ever get it going again but we will have to develop our own software to try to replace Yates’. There is nothing even close to it available in the market today anywhere you look.

So here is our first piece of attempt to replace what formerly existed on our commodities site. It is a simple piece of software which we feel is vital in selecting commodities to feature. Currently, we follow 37 or 38 commodities or so (depending upon whether we wish to include ethanol to replace pork bellies) which are too many to follow daily. We needed to develop software that would look at all 38 “at a glance” and tell us which ones were providing the most activity and opportunities for trading profits. So the following is the result of this which we hope to make a regular offering. The way it works is quite simple, although the software to accomplish it was difficult as we used to do this by hand. Two columns of commodity lists are provided, one for a recent period, and one for an earlier period, and sorted in order of percentage change of closing prices for that period. Then, arrows are drawn from each commodity on the earlier list to the same commodity on the later list to represent graphically the change during a selectable period, in this case five days. The “inactive:” arrows are eliminated, mostly horizontal ones from the middle of the lists. The direction of the arrow shows whether commodity prices were increasing or decreasing, those heading downward being sale candidates. The significance of the arrows is as follows: Those nearly horizontal near the top of the lists are trending upward. Those horizontal arrows near the bottom of the list are trending downward. It is the diagonal arrows we consider the most important. The steeper they are, the more they represent an abrupt change in direction of an active commodity (may be some news item offering opportunity). Those pointing up are shifts from sell to buy candidates and those pointing down are sell candidates. It’s that simple “at a glance” although our readers may suggest other interpretations.

Our previous attempt (five years ago) looked like this...

Older was probably better, but time constraints on preparation force a more automated sequence...
Our current attempt looks like...