Online Stock Trading Software: 5 Trading Tools You Can't Afford To be Without

The advent of online stock trading software in the late 1990's - early 2000's precipitated a surge in stock trading the likes of which had never been seen before. Suddenly, trading in stocks became accessible and profitable to almost anyone who tried it.

The days of manually creating charts with ruler and pencil had gone forever; replaced by online technical charting services and analytical tools.

Live stock quotes, once upon a time 'only available for a huge monthly fee to the wealthy few' had become a free inclusion on the home pages of countless online stock trading web sites.

The technological innovations within the trading sector rapidly advanced to the point where today, online stock trading software is not only easily affordable even for the budget-minded trader... but is also equally easy to use.

There's a vast number of specialist trading software programs on the market, catering for every possible level of experience. Obviously, I can't cover them all here. However, the following five trading tools from Ashkon Software are classic examples of what to look for in online stock trading software and should all be given serious consideration for inclusion in your trading arsenal.

Number 1 Stock Predictor

Is an advanced stock charting and investment strategy performance analysis software package for technical traders. It allows you to easily display several technical indicators for a single stock on the same chart, maintain predefined lists of stocks and test your own investment strategies. Stock Predictor has more than a dozen embedded technical indicators and over four hundred investment strategies.

Another great feature of Stock predictor that I particularly like is the one-click buy and sell function that gives you a unique opportunity to apply a trading strategy to a given stock and view a cumulative and summarized performance of your investment at any selected point in time.

Finally, I'd like to point out that Stock Predictor has a built-in data feed and no subscription fees. In other words, you'll never need to pay for your charts again!

Stock Predictor allows you to print and plot technical historical stock charts, apply and construct analog trading strategies, analyze the trading strategies' performances, and give recommendations to buy, avoid, hold or sell.

Stock Ticker Application Bar

This handy little example of online stock trading software has been designed for continuous retrieval of stock quotes through the Internet. It lives at the top or bottom of your computer screen and displays (in real-time) ECN quotes, including pre-market and after hours quotes or '20 minutes delayed quotes' of predefined lists of stocks, indices and currency symbols as a scrolling message.

The Stock Ticker Application bar also displays quotes for up to 200 securities, automatically or manually updates stock prices, has user defined positioning, scrolling speed, fonts selection; includes top and bottom stock price visual and sound alerts.

Another really cool feature of this particular ticker is the stock price percentage change indicator. You can imagine how helpful that is when comparing a given stock's upward or downward movement with the overall market.

Historical Quotes Downloader

Allows you to instantly download intraday or end-of-day historical quotes of stocks traded in the US. The customized ASCII data output format makes historical quotes data compatible with most technical analysis and charting analysis software packages such as SuperCharts, MetaStock, Advanced Get, Elliott Wave Analyzer, Microsoft Excel, Omega TradeStation and others. No subscription fees.

Stock Sector Monitor

Is a desktop financial application that allows you to easily monitor over 200 stocks and over 7000 public companies online. You can watch daily top losing and gaining stocks from each stock industry sector, see percentage change, quotes, volume and other quotes information, access news, print reports, charts, and create and maintain your stock portfolios.

Ashkon Stock Watch

This is serious charting software for the financial information market. It allows you to display on the same chart several technical single security indicators, open multiple chart documents, test your own investment strategies and maintain predefined lists of securities. While it's got the usual built-in market indicators such as moving averages, price channels, bollinger bands, volatility, stochastic oscillators and MACD momentum indicators, it's a really cool piece of software... especially the way it plots technical indicators in multiple panels (I just hate the way some trading software programs try to cram everything inside one small panel this Stock Watch tool is so refreshingly different!)

Conclusion:

For those of you who are wondering why I chose to review five online stock trading software programs all from the one source, take note: there are over 32,000 web sites in Google alone that focus exclusively on online stock trading software programs. Ashkon is just one of these. However, having personally experienced the quality of Ashkon's products, I have no hesitation in recommending them. Ultimately though, the onus is on you the trader to make the final choice.