What are some good software packages for Technical Analysis?
About 10 years ago, I used to use MetaStock Trader which was a very sound tool, with a large number of indicators, but it has been a number of years since I have used it, so my comments on it will be out of date. At the time it relied upon me purchasing trading data myself, which is why I switched to Incredible Charts. I currently use Incredible Charts which I have done for a number of years, initially on the free adware service, now on the $10/year for EOD data access. There are quicker levels of data access, which might suit you, but I can't comment on these. It is web-based which is key for me. The data quality is very good and the number of inbuilt indicators is excellent. You can build search routines on the basis of specific indicators which is very effective. I'm looking at VectorVest, as a replacement for (or in addition to) Incredible Charts, as it has very powerful backtesting routines and the ability to run test portfolios with specific buy/sell criteria that can simulate and backtest a number of trading scenarios at the same time. The advantage of all of these is they are not tied to a particular broker.
Here is how your CEO has to see it. Of course, eventually most revenues are generated by IT systems but technically IT still is an expense only activity unless of course you are selling the software/services offered by it. According to the US GAAP, software development costs are capitalized when a firm develops a software for its own use (e.g., nice shiny UI show bank's VaR, algorithmic trading engines, internal security infrastructure etc.).  When the software is developed for sale, all the costs are expensed as incurred until the technical feasibility is established after which the costs are capitalized. The income is realized when licenses to use the software or the services provided by it are sold. According to international standards, the treatment for both the use cases shown above is the same --all the costs are expensed as incurred until the technical feasibility is established after which the costs are capitalized. The income is realized when licenses to use the software or the services provided by it are sold. Web Server hosting service offers you with web space to store all your website documents such as content, images, banners, logos, videos and more at one place. Here at Techevolution we offer a vast range of web site hosting packages to the customers. Our server hosting services are of best quality and you get it at most affordable prices. One you go through our hosting packages, and then you have to ask for the required package you are looking for. At our Company, we offer guaranteed 99.9% uptime and several value added services.  Our customers avail with free control panel, free e-mails set ups, free blogs set ups and more. Apart from these services, you can get best technical support for 24/7. Yes, it is true that you get our support whenever you require. At Red Web Design we possess a team of customer service care executives who are there to receive your calls and assist you with perfect information. You can easily compare our hosting charges with others and we challenge that you will never get such cheapest prices elsewhere.  Our customers avail with large on ordering web host. You can get a one Free Domain with each hosting package with no hidden charges or extra payments. We are transparent and do business with complete honesty. Most businesses have some sort of software to manage their client data.  Most of these various software and/or services are industry specific.  Black Diamond seems to be a client management tool targeting investment advisers. From the black diamond site Reach an unparalleled level of productivity and transform your client conversations. You don't need one of these unless you're a professional investment adviser with so many clients you can't track them yourself or need more robust reporting or statement generation tools. For your purposes most regular brokers, Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, TD, etc, have more than enough tools for the retail level investor.  They have news feeds, security analysis papers, historical data, stock screeners, etc.  You, a regular retail investor doesn't need to buy special software, your broker will generally provide these things as part of the service. "You don't seem to be a big fan of trading as you may think it may be too risky or too time consuming being in front of your computer all day long. You also don't seem to be a fan of buy and hold as you don't know what your investments will be worth when you need the funds. How about a combination of the two, sometimes called trend trading or active investing. With this type of trading/investing you may hold a stock from a couple of months to many years. Once you buy a stock that is up-trending or starting to up-trend you hold onto it until it stops up-trending. You can use a combination of fundamental analysis (to find out what to buy) and technical analysis (to tell you when to buy and when to sell). So these are some topics you can start reading up on. Using a technique like this will enable you to invest in healthy stocks when they are moving up in price and get out of them when they start moving down in price. There are many techniques you can use to get out of a stock, but the simplest has to be using stop losses. And once you learn and set up your system it should not take up much of your time when you actually do start trading/investing - 2 to 3 hours per week, and you can set yourself up that you analyse the market after the close and place any order so they get executed the next trading day without you being in front or the screen all day. Other areas you might want to read and learn about are writing up a Trading Plan, using Position Sizing and Money Management so you don't overtrade in any one single trade, and Risk Management. A good book I quite liked is ""Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom"" by Van Tharp. Good luck." "If you're still in school, try taking a Training The Street course in financial modeling and excel. Almost all the BB IB's use them and it's very practical for financial modeling (ie using iterative loops properly in Excel and debugging someone else's models).  As someone who did both Finance and Comp Sci undergrad, TTS was extremely useful for ""real world"" application." Is legacy software pretty standard across the board for trading firms and bulge bracket banks?   I was surprised to learn how old the internal software the place I'm interning at is. Chalk it up to me being young.  Thanks! "You don't. No one uses vanilla double entry accounting software for ""Held-For-Trading Security"".  Your broker or trading software is responsible for providing month-end statement of changes.  You use ""Mark To Market"" valuation at the end of each month.  For example, if your cash position is -$5000 and stock position is +$10000, all you do is write-up/down the account value to $5000.  There should be no sub-accounts for your ""Investment"" account in GNUCash.  So at the end of the month, there would be the following entries:" For academic stuff, SAS and Stata are amazingly better at cleaning and processing huge amounts of data. I love excel and it can certainly do some very amazing things, but at some point you just need a full on statistical software totally driven by its own programming language.    That software is pretty cheap for academics, but corporate licenses are usually insanely more expensive.   Otherwise I program everything in Python.