Trying to find a good trading software that would fit our needs is not as easy as it looks. Those kind of softwares are more and more sophisticated but are they really of such great help in our trading decisions. We will try in this page to give you excellent guidelines on how to evaluate and choose the right software for you.
We will go through guidelines for four trading software we managed to find on the internet.
Free trial facility
First we will try to evaluate their free trial facility and / or their refund policy. This is a very important criteria because if you find out that the software you choosed is not of great help or is not up sales promises the trading software was claiming, you must be able to get your fund back and try another one. Since the cost of each is quite high the free trial or refund policy is of the highest importance.
Technical indicators available
Next we will evaluate and discuss the technical indicators available in each trading software. Most of them supplies the most well known. However the question here is do software you choosed show you how to use them to ease your trading decisions. As you might very well know, no individual technical indicators is good in all market conditions (up trend, down trend, sideways). You might rely on one indicator that does well for a while in a particular market condition and be real bad in another. So we will evaluate if they are good to combine indicators to help trading decisions.
Generate automatic trading signals
Next we will try to evaluate if the software you choosed is capable of generating automatic buy and sell signals built-in or do you have to define your own trading system.
User defined trading system
Next we will evaluate if they have the capability to allow users to define their own trading system with the choosen trading software. Defining our own trading system is no easy task no matter what some people want make you believe the opposite. First you have to master quite well several technical indicators. Second you need to learn a pseudo language to specify your trading rules. Third you need to have the facility to back test your system for several years behind. Don't build a system based only on 2 years. You need a minimum of 10 years to verify the strength and weakness of your trading system. If you can't get data for such a long period you may put yourself in false comfort.
Pattern recognition
Next we will try to evaluate if the trading software you choosed made it easy for you to generate buy and sell signals with as automation as possible a very important feature called 'Pattern recognition'. There are several pattern recognition you need to know before verifying this feature. Some software gives you the opportunity to draw trand lines for example or draw circles on graphics but those are only secondary tools. They don't do it for you. So we will try to find out what kind of pattern recognition implementation they managed to put in their trading software.
Data feeds availability
Next we will try to evaluate what kind of data feed each trading software is supporting. This is an important feature and don't forget that this is an extra monthly cost to your trading decisions. Prices range from 25$ a month for daily data up to 100$ a month if you need intraday data or options and futures data. We will also try to find if they support ascii files you can possibly download from some cheep tools or no cost tools you can build yourself extracting data from Yahoo financial sites for example.
Day trading support
Next we will evaluate if the each trading software supports the day trading facility which means receiving data live during the day directly into your system and ready to be analyzed. As you will see later the price for this day trading facility is much higher for the trading software. You must also pay more for intraday data feed.
Click here to see our day trading system page.
Special characteristics
Next we will outline special characteristics for each trading software.
Ease of use
Next we will try to find out how easy it is to use the trading software you might choose. Some softwares have a lot of fancy features but is it easy to use and are they helpfull in our trading decisions. What we want is a very easy software to use that won't take long to learn and will be quickly reliable to generate buy and sell signals at a success rate of 70% or higher in any choosen market. Easier said than done.
Available Add-Ons
Next we will outline what we call 'Add-Ons' to each trading software. Some products offers at a cost automated trading system built by third party company. The cost is most of time quite high and if you decide to get into that you must make sure you have a trial period policy or refund policy that is acceptable to you. It happens many times that those automated trading systems don't live up to their promises.
Pricing structure
Finally we will outline their pricing structure. Some only sell their products. Some others offer to rent at a monthly fee and you can cancel any time which is an option I would prevail at the evaluation stage. We don't want to spend too much if it ends up as being no help at all or too complicated to use.
As you can see picking the right trading software to fit your trading style and needs is no such easy task. So you must be very carefull delivering this task and we will do our best to help choosing the right trading software.
Click here for Wave59 trading software
Click here for Metastock software
Click here for Omnitrader software
Click here for IQchart software
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