Greetings! I am new to the board and have many questions and some ideas to pitch. I am a novice investor with limited funding but with a large interest in analysis. Investor Software. What exactly do these software products provide? Paint me a pessimist but I struggle understanding why anyone thinks a company would sell a golden goose. If I developed software that significantly picked winners--why would I sell it? The software usually provides buy/sell signals based on a variety of technical analysis tools. Some tweak the formulas a bit--making them proprietary--and feature their custom formulas as a selling point. Aside from these unproven custom formulas, all the tech analysis can be done on sites like barchart.com for free. The big difference I see is charting and the realtime quotes/calculations. But for many other traders whose timeframe is days, weeks or even months--can we live without the real time calculations? Assume for a minute that overnight analysis would be sufficient; there are data services available that can provide EOD quotes for nearly all 10,000 stocks for under $20.00 a month. I experimented with some analysis myself. I subscribed to a service and loaded the raw data into a MySql relational database. I set up automated processes to automatically load the data each night. Then I could query the data anyway I chose and perform calculations (via php). I did create some rudimentary formulas mostly based on 52 week new highs and volume. I do believe software can be developed to generate lists of candidates for further analysis and that this can be done very inexpensively. What I don't possess are the actual formulas, math skills, etc. to calculated all these tech signals. So I ask the board, if you were building homemade sotware, what tech concepts would you employ? MACD? Bollinger? EMA? MA? RS? Momentum? And why hasn't any non-corporate investors created their own software? Or have they? Appreciate any responses.