Last weekend's ChartCon conference in Seattle was amazing. Myself and the other newsletter authors met so many terrific people during the event and the feedback that we are getting from the attendees is extremely positive. Thanks again to everyone that attended!

We made several big announcements at ChartCon, but the biggest had to be the announcement of our new PRO service. PRO is a new service for members that want to break through the limitations of our Extra and ExtraRT services. 15-second refresh rate too slow for you? PRO refreshes every 5-seconds. 1500-pixel charts too small? PRO goes up to 2500-pixels. Five user-defined alerts not enough? PRO users can have 50. Click here for a complete list of PRO's features and how they compare to our other services.

(Just so you know, PRO is not intended for everyone. If Basic or Extra works well for you then please don't feel compelled to upgrade. Only upgrade to PRO if you really need one or more of PRO's features.)

While PRO has a lot of features to talk about, right now I want to focus in on what I think it its most powerful feature: User-Defined Indexes.

A User-Defined Index is a dataset that you create and maintain. You enter the data - either by hand or via an spreadsheet upload - and then you can chart it and analyze it using our SharpCharts tool.

So, what can you do with a User-Defined Index? Here's a partial list of ideas:

Create and chart your own Bullish Percent Index

Create and chart any other sentiment information you can think of (# of CNBC commercials per day anyone?)

Upload and chart economic data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve

Upload and chart any of the datasets from websites like Wikiposit.org

Calculate your own technical indicator using Excel formulas and chart the results

Eliminate "bad" datapoints from our regular data and chart your corrected version

and much, much, much, much more...

Are you starting to get excited? Before we get too much farther however, I do need to mention that there are some limitations for User-Defined Indexes:

Right now, only PRO users can create and use them. That may change in a year or so after we've made sure that our systems can handle their performance impact.

Initially, PRO users can only use one single User-Defined index. (They can re-use it as often as they want however.) We plan on allowing PRO users to create several additional indexes at some point in the next couple of months.

PRO users can access their data via the special @MYINDEX ticker symbol. In the future, we will allow PRO users to specify their own ticker symbol and description for their indexes.

User-Defined indexes can only store daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly data. They cannot store intraday data.

Currently, user-defined indexes cannot be shared with others. We hope to be able to remove that restriction for PRO users in the next couple of months. For now however, they cannot be emailed, tweeted, bookmarked, or even added to a Public ChartList. Any data that you add to your user-defined index will only be visible to you.

OK, enough with all the legal-sounding limitations. Let's see these things in action!

Charting the Quarterly Rate of Change for the US GDP