) even though I had been “lunchtime” trading for several years.
After driving numerous suppliers mad with my questions, the choice for me came down to Metastock or BullCharts. At the time they were both much the same price so I decided to be patriotic and give the “Aussie” offering a go.
I have really put this product through its paces. I started with EOD data and then latter upgraded to intraday data. I use Bullcharts every day and frequently knock up a scan or custom indicator in a matter of minutes to check out some aspect of the everchanging markets. I have a programming background so I guess that helps but I think any reasonably intelligent person who is prepared to persevere could master the programming side if they want to and need to. Some traders may not need to program at all. It depends on your trading style and what you want to achieve.
The product has been very reliable and the support has been good.
Most of my gripes about Bullcharts are the rather cludgy interfaces to some of the intraday facilities like market depth, watch lists and alerts. I believe that the developers are addressing some of these problems in future releases.
My other gripe, which wouldn’t affect most people is that I would like to be able to use my programming skills to extend Bullcharts and also get at the intraday data. (It is pretty easy to tap into the EOD data in the database)
Bullcharts dont really offer much in the way of help to do this but they did tell me that the Metastock Development Kit (MDK) “will probably” work with Bullcharts. I am presently investigating this with a view to writing my own plugins for exotic things like neural network indicators and digital filters.
I don’t really think that you need these things for sucessfull trading but for someone like me they are fun to play with.
By the way, readily available Metastock scripts and custom indicators can be used in Bullcharts usually with little or minimal modification. I am not sure how userfriendly Bullcharts is to various commercial Metastock plugins. I do know that TradeSim, another excellent program works well with Bullcharts.
I doubt if any one program can meet all requirements but Bullcharts has provided me with a good basis for technical trading and it will probably remain a part of my trading software well into the foreseeable future.
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