I have been devoting more time to tools which assist with our stock market trading. Being a fan of open development, those tools do have a focus on collaboration. If you too like to be involved in your trading tools then please join us on these projects.
It was a long quest to find suitable tools that work well on Mac OS X, as many seem to be Windows based. Here is an overview of my current setup:
Charts:
Qtstalker – Commodity and stock market charting and technical analysis
This is an open-source project. My main efforts have been to enable it on Mac as well as on Linux, helping with documentation and bug-fixing, and keeping the project afloat during a past quiet phase. As with many open-source projects, there has not been a release for a while and the website is old, but the CVS development version is happening.
Of course, market data is required for showing the charts and analyses. The program can obtain that from free services such as Yahoo. However, i reckon that paid data is better (see below).
Placing trades:
We place and manage our actual trades via our bank online trading facilities: NAB works okay with Mac. Through that we also obtain the PDF files for company announcements.
Live dynamic market data:
Lots of time was spent searching for a service that works well with browsers and Mac, and that is focussed on providing data from the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). TurboTrader is a beauty.
TT has “Profiles” and “Watchlists” to filter the market in real-time according to certain criteria and to show alerts when conditions are met. It draws attention to increase in volume with only small change in price. It has the best display of market depth of buyers and sellers. There is a “Portfolio” (currently just paper trading) which is useful for notifying opportunities. TT also provides announcement headlines and alerts, intra-day charts, end-of-day data for loading to our charting tool, and chat-rooms for assisting each other.
Co-operative:
The Australian Share Traders Co-operative Limited
A group of us who are subscribers to TurboTrader, recently formed the Co-operative. It is registered under the Victorian state government Co-operatives Act. This is a new type of business organisation which operates for the benefit of its members, and enables the members to collaborate with funding and development of our market services.
Disclosure: I am a member of the Co-operative, so have a commercial interest in the Co-op and TurboTrader.
Warning: Trading can be distracting to the rest of our life, just like participation in open-source can be.
