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Financial Trading Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the not-spending-money-to-make-money dept.

finance-geek asks: "What software do you use for trade evaluation? Are there any good free programs out there? I am a former programmer now working at an investment fund, and I am shocked at the limited number of applications for evaluating and back-testing trading models. We currently use Wealth Lab , but since they were recently purchased by Fidelity, we are less certain about the future of their customer service. I checked out SourceForge.net but only a few programs looked interesting, and it will take me a while to evaluate them. Any suggestions?"

1 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. As somebody who writes this stuff during the day.. by cmowire · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The real problem is getting a reliable (i.e. non screen-scraped from Yahoo and preferebly scrubbed for accuracy) set of data and storing it.

    And, even if they'd *like* to, exchange rules *forbid* vendors from giving away real-time (i.e. non delayed-by-20-minutes) feeds.

    I think, for the most part, if you don't have a lot of money, sophisticated tools are a waste of time, because you'd get better results putting them into mutual funds, bonds, ETFs, and savings accounts. If you've got a lot of money, the cost for some good tools (and a data vendor who properly scrubs the data) is money well spent.

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    Gentoo Sucks