Harness Technical Analysis

Trade Strategist belongs to a field of finance called Technical Analysis, in which trading decisions are based on measurable quantities, rather than the emotions or psychology of the trader. A ‘technical’ trader makes use of charts and indicators that derive from price and other data to decide when to buy or sell stock.

Whether you are a seasoned veteran of Technical Analysis, or have never heard the term before, Trade Strategist has something to offer. For the experienced trader, it is a powerful yet easy to use tool. For the beginner, it is a great way to learn Technical Analysis, and improve your skills. Because you can develop and test trading strategies before you use them, it can end up saving you a lot of money — you learn what does and doesn’t work without getting your feet wet. It is a bit like paper trading at high speed!

Create Your Own Indicators

With more than 90 built-in functions and indicators, Trade Strategist provides a rich tapesty with which to work. But you are not restricted to just these basic functions, because you can combine them in almost any way you can think of. And if you are a power user, with some Cocoa programming experience, you can use the Software Development Kit (SDK) to write plugins that incorporate your own indicators into Trade Strategist. You can find a complete list of the indicators and functions supported by Trade Strategist here.

Create and Test Trading Strategies

The center piece of Trade Strategist is trading strategy development.
This involves combining the built-in indicators into rules that determine when stock should be bought and sold. You can then test a strategy on historical price data to see how well it performs (known as ‘backtesting’): Trade Strategist downloads price data for the stock and range of dates that you choose, and then moves from day-to-day, checking if any signals are generated by the strategy. When a signal is generated, Trade Strategist makes a virtual trade, and keeps track of how much you would have made or lost had you really been using the strategy. At the end of the simulation, you are presented with detailed results of trading activity, including a day-by-day break down of the data in tabular and chart form.

Generate Signals for Real Trading

If you come up with some good strategies, you can use them to help guide your daily trading activities. Trade Strategist can take a strategy, and check what signals are generated for a given stock, based on the latest data available on the internet. You can generate signals for multiple stocks and strategies at a time, and use the results to decide what trades you will make the next day.

Make Charts

No Technical Analysis package would be complete without charting, and Trade Strategist is no exception. You can chart just about any function or indicator you can come up with in Trade Strategist. Each chart can include multiple plots of different expressions, and expressions can be saved for later use.

Export Data

Anytime you create a chart in Trade Strategist, you can export or copy its data, for use in other applications such as spreadsheets. So even if you are not interested in building strategies, you can still use Trade Strategist to calculate complicated Technical Analysis functions, and transfer the results to another package. In this way, Trade Strategist can be used as a powerful calculator, complementing your other financial software.

Free Price Data

Where most Technical Analysis packages require you to subscribe to a data provider with monthly charges, Trade Strategist uses freely available data from the internet. Once you have registered Trade Strategist, you have no further costs. If you already subscribe to a data provider, you may be able to use the Trade Strategist Software Development Kit (SDK) to create a plugin that allows you to access the provider with Trade Strategist.

A Mac Exclusive

Many Technical Analysis applications on the Mac are first written for other platforms and ported, or developed with cross-platform software libraries. This often leads to unstable buggy applications, or software that does not feel like it was written for the Mac. As Mac users, we appreciate and demand high quality software, with the look-and-feel of the Mac.

Trade Strategist has been written solely for Mac OS X with the Cocoa frameworks. Cocoa is a great development environment, and has allowed us to come up with a robust and powerful package. We benefit, because it is possible to do things with Cocoa that are much more difficult with other frameworks, but you benefit too, because the final product is so much better than otherwise would have been possible.

Trade Strategist Features

Trade Strategist comes in two different varieties: demo and pro. The download itself is the same in each case, but purchasing a license makes extra functionality available. Here we provide a feature table, detailing the capabilities of the two varieties of Trade Strategist.

Feature	Description	Demo	Pro
No time limits	Does not expire after a given period of use
Randomly-generated data	Can use random, fictional data while offline
Database	Caching database for improved performance, and offline usage
Sample data	NASDAQ 100 stock data from 2000 to 2004
Downloaded stock data	Can use downloaded stock data, with no fees or subscriptions
Non-US stock data	Access to non-US stock data
Foreign Exchange rates	Access to free Foreign Exchange rate data
Basic indicators	Calculates around 40 basic functions and indicators
Advanced indicators	Calculates around 40 advanced functions and indicators
Charting	Charts any function or indicator available to the user
Unlimited charts	Create as many charts per document as you like
Export chart data	Export data to other applications, such as spreadsheets
Copy chart data	Copy data to clipboard, and paste into other applications
Build strategies	Combine functions and indicators into trading strategies
Stock lists	Combine stock tickers into lists that can be used together
Backtesting	Test strategies on available historical data
Multiple backtests	Runs backtests for multiple strategies and stocks together
Tabular and charted results	Provides tabular and charted results for backtests
Generate signals	Generate signals from strategies to guide real-life trading
Extendible	Add new functions and data sources using Cocoa plugins
Spotlight	Supports spotlight searches of document content
Support	Prompt online support