Free Charting Software?

Smcgie

Any recommendations. I'm venturing into some CFD Trading and would appreciate any help with good charting software or website.

Ta
S.

freeze4real

Smcgie wrote: »

Any recommendations. I'm venturing into some CFD Trading and would appreciate any help with good charting software or website.

Ta
S.

its good to see someone going into CFD'S like myself.

I dont know any software but i want to give metatrader a shot and see what's its like.

what broker are you using?

Smcgie

freeze4real wrote: »

its good to see someone going into CFD'S like myself.

I dont know any software but i want to give metatrader a shot and see what's its like.

what broker are you using?

I have a share dealing AC with TD waterhouse so I stuck with them for the CFD account too. £20 a trade is steep though. Who are you using?

freeze4real

At the moment I'm using Avafx I've no problems with them.
they only charge you on the profit that you make.

But i might switch to delta stock because they have loads of CFD'S to choose from.

yea £20 its a bit too much.

gb153

I just started investing about four months ago and the one area that I have found most frustrating is trying to find decent free charting software.

The area that causes the cause difficulty is trying to find software which can apply all the technical analysis you would like to use to the investments you are interested in. I have found that the software that has the technical analysis tools does not always include the stocks/commodities that I am interested in.

I use paddypower for spreadbetting. Their charts can vary in quality as sometimes they do not provide a long time frame of data for analysing long term trends. I don't know why this is. I actually must contact them about this as I presume it simply a software bug.

I use markets.com (formerly GFC Markets) for trading CFDs. Their own charting software is ok but it can be unreliable at times. Again some of their long term chart data doesn't exist. I rang them about this and they simply said they do not have enough bars to create long term trends. Pretty lame excuse. Also they do not even provide a volume tool. This would be pretty basic I would have thought.

Another area which can cause confusion is sometimes when I analyse a particular stock or commodity using two different software companies the volume will differ in each by huge amounts. This may be related to the fact that volume may be measured in different ways for different trading vehicles e.g. shares, contracts, dollars. I don't know what volume spread betting is based on but I have been meaning to find out.

I looked up a survey recently on free charting software and freestockcharts.com came out on top. Their technical analysis really is excellent. I have found they provide the greatest level of control on which time period you wish to use in addition to the largest selection of technical analysis tools. For example I read the book "Come into my Trading Room" by Alexander Elder. In the book he describes tools called Elder Ray and Elder Force Index which the author designed himself. I was surprised to see that both of these tools are included with freestockcharts. They have a very comprehensive database of stocks/shares/commodites etc. However they do not provide info for Irish companies.

Yahoo Finance rated quite well also. One downside to this site I find is that I cannot specify which data I want to use for my moving averages. E.g. I cannot specify to use weekly closing prices for a weekly moving average. I am forced to use daily closing prices for a daily moving average for a certain time period. They do provide analysis for Irish stocks though.

I have tried Zignals also (Irish company). They are quite good also but again they do not provide adequate control over which timeframes you wish to use.

Metastock seems to be quite highly rated however as far as I know it is not free.