Great post. Every few years I get an urge to learn programming. A few lessons in and I realize it's the most tedious boring minutiae I've ever seen. Hopefully they will develop even higher level languages that someday make it simple to program. Until then...
+1 Sometimes a wonder why banks don't just fire their whole tech departments, because, as I see it, maybe 80% of the stuff that matters in a markets environment is done on the desktop. (Serious post).
If you haven't tried python yet, it's a lot more fun. To the OP, esignal provides you with some ready made spreadsheet setup, so you just plug it in and you can manipulate real time formulas in excel (winros it is called), it is really neat.
I started with Metastock, then had a long look at C# but have now found MT4 more friendly with free stuff.
I use matlab 2008b for doing automated scans for US stocks using end of day data from yahoo finance and for scraping data from web sties. Matlab is expensive if you choose to buy it, but no doubt its available from torrent sites. If I didn't have matlab then I'd use python as it is free. http://www.python.org/
Excel is a good choice no matter what else you do. There are free data sources and XLQ (not free but reasonable) can help get data into Excel (there is probably free code to do this also). I'm sure there are tons of free tutorials on Excel. R is the next obvious choice. It is extremely good for those wishing to do statistical analysis and heavily used in research. There are free courses on Coursera.org that can help you learn R. They are not listed as courses on R, but on Statistics or Data Analysis or etc. R has libraries to help you do financial analysis. Next, you may find a program like AmiBroker, Wealth Lab Pro, Ninja, etc., a programmable platform, may be of use. Some of these platforms have their own scripting language but others will allow you to write programs in C#. If you envision moving to complex systems being able to program in C# may allow you to do things that you can't easily achieve in a simple scripting language. At some point in the future you may want to connect to a real-time data feed. I use IQFeed and you can connect to it with any language including Excel, R C/C++,C#, Java, etc. If you want to connect to a broker, I use IB, you can do that also. Since what you want to do right now is pretty simple I suggest you start with Excel. When you want to do more learn R. At the same time get a nice programmable platform that can use free data from Yahoo. Go wild. Everyone has to follow their own path. Good luck, -David
well so is anything else that is worth doing. spend your whole life trying to find that easy thing, you're going to be waiting a long time.