Favorite swing trading softwares

[TinGull 10]

Spamming and everything of that sort aside, what is your favorite software for scanning for stocks to trade?

 

MrPaul told me about Telechart and Blocks...holy crap, TeleChart is intense. It's fairly intuitive for a Windows program :rofl: and is lacking in the whole design of it all. You get either a black background or white. No off-white or anything like that. The candles are a little odd in that if the candles gaps up but closes down, it'll draw solid for a down candle, but show green for closing above the previous close. There's no way around that.

 

Anyhow...I love it so far. They've got a killer community of staff who are there to help you write the scans you want to do so you don't always have to know the coding language, but even then...doing scans isnt too tough.

 

What do others use for finding those great swing candidates?

 

 

btw...I don't get paid to say these guys are good so far....in fact, I pay them for me to say that!

[waveslider 10]

genesis tradenavigator is very good, but expensive. I think neoticker looks good, but never used it

[brownsfan019 17]

When I started to get interested again in some swing plays, here's a few that I looked at:

 

http://www.esignal.com/esignal/pricing/default.asp

> EOD is only $295 for the YEAR. That seems attractive.

 

http://www.stockfetcher.com/

> Nice as well, but I don't like that it will not save your annotations - lines, arrows, text, etc. This may have changed since I looked at it.

 

http://www.prophet.net/

> I like these charts and the searches and such on the website itself are nice.

 

http://www.worden.com/default.aspx

> I absolutely hated this thing. The candles are made so oddly and you cannot change it to the 'normal' candle look. Basically they construct the candles with hollow and solid bodies and also color code them. For me, it just made things more confusing.

 

http://www.tradestation.com

> Old reliable I guess. Never used them for stock quotes and charting, so not sure how it works and costs involved.

 

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Right now the eSignal EOD looks good if you do not need all the other bells and whistles. The prophet one is nice as well, partly due to the other stuff you get on the website itself. Could be good for trade ideas.

 

Really the swing trading discussion can be broken into two parts, although many co's provide both - the actual charting and trade ideas/scanners. In other words, you could find use of prophet's scanners and builds, but like eSignal's charting better.

[waveslider 10]

Oh yeah stockfetcher is great! Don't use them for charting, you can get that free somewhere if you use EOD. Stockfetcher is powerful scanning, good as it gets.

[TinGull 10]

Yea, the candles is the big thing with Telecharts that is really tough for me to get over. The scanning is easy and fast for me, and its pretty cheap. 30 bucks a month.

[TinGull 10]

Looking at StockFetcher....is this all web based?

[Reaver 10]

Hey Tin, funny you mention that, as ironically I am looking at IRT for some longer term stuff right now....I haven't actively used charts for a while and let my Ensign subscription roll over.....

 

But I would say check out Ensign as well, I have been happy with them, but want to test everything else out too to make sure I am not missing anything...I am expecially drawn to IRT because of the VWAP thing they have going on, which I am convinced will work equally well on a longer term basis along with a few more ideas I am testing.....

 

But I do like Ensign's price histogram/profile MUCH better than IRT ( I am not rerferring to the CBOT MP indicator, I am referring the one called "profile" on IRT).

 

I have used SMR in the past, and they have their ups and downs, and as my trading evolved I decided it wasn't the best option for me....

 

But right now, I like Ensign from experience and IRT from the potetntial I have seen. I will report more later.

[brownsfan019 17]

Looking at StockFetcher....is this all web based?

 

Not quite sure Tin. I wasn't sure if it was all web based or a download. I'd send an email and see what they see.

[TinGull 10]

it totally is web based. It's really slick looking, too, and inexpensive!

[brownsfan019 17]

it totally is web based. It's really slick looking, too, and inexpensive!

 

I liked it when I checked it out, but since it does not save your drawings, I wasn't thrilled. I just like to annotate my charts and have that saved going forward.

[TinGull 10]

Back in 2005 they said they were going to introduce saving annotations....

[TinGull 10]

Some words about StockFetcher... I really like it! The syntax for creating scans is incredibly easy to figure out and the charts are really nice looking...very Mac-esque.

 

The bad things...I can't figure out how to draw simple trend lines and not have it just be an annotation line. The annotation lines don't scale when you zoom in and out.

 

You cant save chart setting, so if you always want say a certain MA or always want MACD on your chart...you cant have it always pop up UNLESS you type it into every scan you do to draw those things. You can set default syntax to have that show up all the time...little bit of a workaround.

 

The worst thing...the support forums. It doesn't seem like peoples questions are answered an awful lot by their support team. Granted, the product is cheap and can even be run for free if you can deal with the 100 stock return on scans so the money probably isn't there for a full time support staff...but still, it's pretty slow going.

 

There also isn't a listing of the syntax that can be used. If there's something that isn't readily available on their site but *should* be able to be searched, you have to guess, and keep guessing until you figure it out, if you even do. I asked them for a listing of all syntax available for use, but they haven't replied to my email yet...so we'll see. It's cheap, but if the support isn't there when you need help, is that gonna be OK?

[brownsfan019 17]

Tin,

Check out http://www.stockcharts.com as well. Not sure what they offer in terms of paid services, but I've always liked their site.

[TinGull 10]

Oh....StockFetcher won't let you draw anything on their charts. You can code in a Fib retracement, but can't just select a drawing tool to do it. While the charts are pretty and all, I don't think I could use it for charting. For scanning, I certainly could.

[TinGull 10]

One real cool thing about stockfetcher, tho...you can quickly scan for a pattern with their pattern recognition. I have no idea how it works, but this one had come up yesterday... BEAS. 33% move today searching for the ascending triangle yesterday.

 

[SpotFXTrader 10]

http://www.chartsmart.com

 

An awesome program to find setups and the like...

 

Spot