I strongly recommend Peter Hoadley's Options Strategy Analysis Tool (OSET). It is free but in order to make it fully functional you need to buy Hoadley's Derivatives Add-in for Excel which costs $AU99 (Australian dollars).
Well, since you "<i>strongly recommend Peter Hoadley's Options Strategy Analysis Tool (OSET)</i>", I think it would be helpful to explain how you use it so we can better understand why you feel so strongly. Some examples would be helpful.
db, Most of what you can do on OV you can do on TOS. Stuff that are not available on TOS at this moment, but are doable on OV: - superimposing different trade ideas so you can look at the P/L graphs and compare which you prefer - OV's OpScan feature is more powerful than TOS's SpreadHacker - I personally prefer OV's option matrix layout, it's very intuitive. - OV has ability to track adjustments you make on a trade and adjust the P/L accordingly. TOS does not have this feature, yet. However, TOS is free. TOS is also releasing updates and improvements on a monthly basis, if I'm not mistaken. They're even coming out with backtesting functionality. I could not believe what I saw when I first opened up OV. The icons look like they were from the Windows 3.1 days. But I have to give credit to whoever designed the layout, after spending some time on it, I've grown to like it. OV is kinda buggy though, I often get error messages about illegal floating point operation, or cannot read address 0xXXXXXXX or something like that.
optionstar www.optionstar.com. Is a excel plugin. With end of day data feed. It is the poorman's and I mean poorman's Optionvue. But if you are not trading a huge portfolio that requires real-time analysis it works really well.
Guys, why bother? Just open an account with ToS and you have instant free access to a great trading platform.