Using a software package to select, track, and manage your investments can be a great help to most traders and investors but with so many software packages available and all sorts of confusing claims from producers, choosing the right investment software can be a difficult decision.
There are many different investment styles, but successful investors share a few common characteristics – they are disciplined, organised and can remove their emotions from the investing process. Having the right tools at your disposal will help you acquire these characteristics, and one of the most important tools is the right investment software package.
What does Share Trading Software do?
Investment software can help improve your investing by:
Organising your trading – Portfolio management software will let you monitor your portfolio and prepare reports for your accountant.
Presenting complex information visually – Humans process information better through images than streams of facts and figures. Charting software displays share price data in charts to help you easily see trends, areas of support and resistance, and allows you to gauge whether a stock is overbought or oversold.
Testing and implementing a trading plan – Disciplined trading requires you to set rules about when to enter and exit the market, and how much money to commit to each trade. Investment software will help you build and test your trading plan to manage this process, and take the emotion out of trading.
Saving you time – Scanning tools let you scan over 1500 stocks on the ASX or say all the stocks quoted on the London Stock Exchange for investment opportunities based on your fundamental (financial) or technical criteria.
Beware the Blackbox
We recommend that you build your own trading plan using your own criteria. Some other companies promote expensive trading systems or software based on proprietary systems which claim to deliver massive returns in only a few minutes per week. These are called ‘blackbox’ systems and in the opinion of many investment heavyweights, usually do not justify their price tags.
Markets continually change, and no system will consistently work across all markets or for all personalities. Our advice is, rather than looking for the magic solution, spend your time and much less money to educate yourself and develop a trading plan suited to your own personality and investment requirements.
Which Software is Right for You?
Of course which package you choose is going to depend on what you need it to do. For instance Prorealtime software might be good for trading with charts while Sharescope is good for scanning UK shares.
