For those considering Metastock (any version), regardless of what Equis sales tells you, be advised that Metastock does not chart in pre-market and post-market hours. In response to my inquiry, Equis tech support says: "MetaStock can only plot data from eSignal that is flagged as a real-time trade. We can plot futures that trade after regular trading hours, because the data is flagged as real-time. The data for stocks, before and after regular trading hours, are not flagged as real-time trades. You may notice in eSignal's interval tabular that all of these times are stamped with formT, these formT flags are not treated as real-time trades, therefore MetaStock will not plot this data. The formT are flagged as quotes not trades. We discard all quotes and only keep the trades. It was not designed to chart quotes. We are looking into making this change for an upcoming version. There is no time frame set for this new version."
Just to add a different point of view: I own both MetaStock versions, EOD and Realtime. The software is capable of displaying data in any time period. I can set the times for any symbol from 12am all the way to 12am the next day. Displaying and recording data outside of Regular Trading Hours is not a problem; I capture realtime S&P data for a good 1.5 hours before each market open. I think what Equis is referring to is the MetaStock/ESignal combination. I don't use that so I can't comment. I use Quote.com as a data provider. Dynastore is a software package that takes QFeed streaming data and interfaces it to my MetaStock real-time software. I can leave it running and collecting 24 hours per day. Fortunately, that's not necessary. I use another data collection sofware, QCollector, that's excellent. I can download any timeframe of data from tick to monthly from quote.com. That includes non-Regular Trading Hours. I just select or deselect "All Sessions" as necessary. This applies to stocks and futures(GLOBEX2 and day sessions share the same symbol in my data feed). My daily download of intraday and daily data for 409 symbols takes about 3 minutes over cable modem. So, I think it depends on who you choose as a data vendor. Displaying bars outside of RTH is not a MetaStock limitation.