Basic Stock Investment Software

The most basic trading software is a program you use with your online broker. That includes stock quotes and basic charting. This type of platform handles placing trades, monitoring your portfolio, simple account management and basic charting capabilities. Due to competition brokers have begun to included advanced real-time charting and many different types of technical analysis indicators.

 

Pro Traders Use Pro Software

Once you have basic knowledge of stock trading. You must decide what type of trading software is best for you. Software ranges from very basic to extremely advanced. There are countless options, features and types of software.

Most online brokers include some type of trading software in their platform.

But, most professional traders look for third-party software to use instead of the software included with their brokerage platform.

Most professionals use some type of software to help them prevent mistakes caused by lack of control over their emotions. Fear and greed will kill a trader but has no effect on trading software.

Trading software serves many purposes:

1. Searching for high probability buy/sell signals

2. Backtesting

3. Forecasting market tops and bottoms

4. Identifying trends forming

5. Identifying breakouts

6. Automating your trading

7. Alerts for preset events i.e. when a price target is reached

8. Pattern Identification

Download and try out any software program before buying it to see if it suits all of your needs. All of the best software programs have a free trial, or a 100% money-back guarantee.

Key Software Features

Backtesting - Back testing is simply creating a trading strategy, inputting your trading parameters and having the software program do a simulation based on historical data to see that number of winning and losing trades you would have and determine how profitable that strategy is. Back testing can be a very arduous process , but also very helpful in creating a strategy and maximizing the likelihood of successful trades.

Automated Stock Trading Systems – are another type of stock trading software. This system allows you to create your own stock trading system that automatically places trades according to your parameters. One of the greatest and most common downfalls of traders is lack of discipline and allowing human emotions to cloud your judgment. Automated trading removes a person’s inability to do what they know they should do, such as take a loss and sell rather than cross your fingers and pray.

Tradestation includes EasyLanguage which is a very powerful programming software to write your parameters for backtesting. Note that it is not easy to program a backtest. StockWatch Pro and NeoTicker are newer and much easier to program for backtesting.

Deciding which is the best technical analysis software depends on the requirements of the trader.

Types of Software

End-of-Day Stock Trading Software

A very popular time frames for technical analysis software is the ‘End-Of-Day’ (EOD). Daytraders really have no interest in EOD data software. This is more for longer term investors. They analyze the market after it closes. EOD software is simply charting software that plots the stock or markets in all different time frames, with chart and various indicators. Day traders may use EOD to find stock candidates but need real time software to trade. Some EOD software that is highly respected is Worden’s Gold Tele-Chart ($29.99 month), AIQ $74 per month, Metastock End-of-Day ($449) plus data feed, NeoTicker EOD are the two leaders in this field.