Stock Quoting Program

Online stock and mutual fund investing is one of the fastest growing segments of the computer industry, and Alpha Microsystems of Santa Ana is hoping to grab a piece of this market with stock quote software the company is developing.

Alpha Stockvue, which is scheduled for release next month, is designed to help investors keep track of their holdings by fetching stock price quotes from the Internet and plugging the numbers into popular personal finance programs such as Quicken.

The program taps the wealth of financial information available for free on the Internet, information any computer user with a modem and Internet account can access. But Denny Michael, a spokesman for Alpha Microsystems, said the company’s product is designed to save investors’ time by doing their research for them.

Users plug in the ticker symbols of the stocks they wish to track, select from a menu of Internet stock sites and specify when they want the information retrieved, he said. Using Windows 95, the software dials up and gets the data.

“It’s all automatic,” Michael said. “It will even give you alerts if a stock drops below a certain point.”

Preview copies of the software will be available at the firm’s Web site, https://www.alphaconnect.com within a few weeks he said. The software is expected to sell for about $39.