Looking for software: Intraday historical, fairly inexpensive, basic charting ...

Discussion in 'Trading Software' started by djxput, Sep 30, 2006.

  1. djxput

    djxput

    I'm looking for a software program that I can work on testing my system on.

    I dont need r/t atm; I want to make sure I'm not going to throw money at the market and give myself time to work on getting my system and trading where I would like it before I use real money.

    So what I want to do is:

    1. Use Historical intra-day data ie 5/15/60 min charts going back 1-3 years if possible.

    2. I dont need to write scripts or anything for my system; it's more of a manual (look at the chart and trade it using certain criteria).

    3. Charting must have candles/ability to draw lines/some simple studies ie volume, MACD, stoch etc ...

    4. I'd like something with a playback function; but it's not necessary.

    - I've used Qcharts mostly in the past and I really liked the charting but atm I want to see if there is something better out there for the money; and I prefer not to spend 100$ for that when I'm not even going to be trading atm (just paper trading and testing).

    Qcharts did have a nice history of historical data where i could bring up a chart (say a 30 min chart) and go back a year and manually scroll bar by bar.

    - I have an account with IB; is their intra-day data still limited to 10 days?

    - In the past few days I have looked at all sorts of software and data feeds (attempting to figure out what would work for me the best).

    GenesistFT - This program looks decent although the price tag looks rather steep; it has a playback function also. I'm not interested in spending 2k on a program.

    Ninjatrader - This looks promising; although I havn't even gotten close to getting it to work. It lists a few services that I can use for data DTN.IQ, esignal, IB, MB trading, Trackdata and Tradestation. Like I said above I could care less about RT data atm; just want some historical intra-day data (1 year at least preferably).

    Ensign - I installed ensign and played around a little with this using some old data from dacharts.org. So far I dont like this method that much; it does have a playback function but I really cant get a feel for the whole chart with the limited time frame. So still may consider this; although at first glance not impressed.

    Rightedge - Had been trying to get this to work for the past day; tried it with opentick etc ... Looks like a decent program; but still in beta and not sure what to use for historical data anyways.

    Hopefully I find a program that I can use for my needs and then when I decide to put money in the market I can just switch to rt trading.

    So what do you suggest for best bang for the buck for my needs ...