HowardCohodas

I'm a fan of the triple view. I prefer the approach where whatever time frame you choose to trade, you should use your same analytics by scaling the time frame and scaling down the time frame by the same factor. If all three agree, enter the trade.

CamStudio is less capable than CamTasia. That's why CamStudio is free.

"Best" is always hard to advise for someone else. Your choice of best will depend on the type of trading you do, the decision support functions available, the number of mouse clicks to achieve the trade and your personal taste with respect to interface. The best I can do for you is suggest the platform I settled on which is ThinkOrSwim. Initially designed for floor traders in the options market, it has wonderful efficiencies and analytics built into it. Most important for me, it meshes with my preferences in user interface design. Good luck in your hunt.

I create my own live analytics in Excel by using the TOS export function. When in the Trade tab and viewing an option chain, the Printer icon has an option to export to Excel. I paste this into Excel and then delete extraneous cells to minimize the cpu burden for continuous update. I can't speak to the efficacy for doing it for 500 stocks, but testing it is pretty easy. Also, once I figured out how the TOS information was described by the formula pasted in the spreadsheet, I began just typing the formulas rather than doing an export for each data set.

TOS has at least three environments that I know about for creating scan-type results and I'm relatively new to the platform. The most primitive can be found on the Scan tab. Look at the StockHacker and SpreadHacker for some ideas on what it can do. The second environment is ThinkScript mentioned above. I'm not very familiar with its complete capability. The most fascinating environment is the Prodigio application. It's appeal is a graphical environment to create your rules. This environment contains a great variety of studies including the ones you mention. You can set it up to notify you or robot trade for you when your criteria are met. I watched a demo of creating a Bollinger Band squeeze strategy and was blown away. If it's not on your sub-menu bar when the Trade menu is active, a quick not to TOS will get them to enable it for you. Others more familiar with TOS may know additional capabilities to achieve your goals.

I use CamStudio to record trading sessions, webinars and videos that block downloading. I've been quite satisfied with the quality of the results, however I can't say I really paid attention to the file size. It is free and open source.

A Nobel prize in economics was awarded in an attempt to model options prices based on market parameters. I accept the results, but don't claim to completely understand it either. Once contract covers controls 100 shares. You might start here to learn more about options.

Some personal notes on charity: Starting close to home, my wife has been a community leader in ameliorating hunger in our community. In addition to being a member of the board of the Hunger Task force, she co-founded our community's rescued foods program working with the state legislators to provide protection to the donors with a Good Samaritan law. The lesson: besides money, donating of your time is a great idea. When solicited by charities it is always a good idea to know their performance with respect to administration and fund raising costs. I check the following online site: Charity Navigator - Your Guide to Intelligent Giving

I'm an engineer and tinkering is in my DNA. Modifying my recipe means that I do backtesting (think engineering computer simulations). If backtesting shows potential, I then move on to paper trading (think building and running a prototype). Only then do I modify my process or introduce a new process for a different strategy into my trading. Both backtesting and paper trading have their limitations in representing actual results in fashion similar to the development steps in my engineering analogy. And just as in engineering, going through the steps reduces the probability of financial disaster.