Stock Option Trading Software
How do you actually manage your portfolio of stocks and options?
How do you keep track of your profits (and losses)? How do you pick your next investment, or decide to get out of a position? Pencil and paper? A spreadsheet? Your online trading account? There may be a better way - using special-purpose software for all of these tasks.
What could this software to do for you? Here's 10 things I would want from my software package:
1. Historical reports of the status of the stocks I am interested in - if I trade stocks this is obviously important. If I trade options, it's just as important to know the progress of the underlying stocks before making buy/sell decisions.
2. Automatically show trends, resistance levels, support levels - turning points are very significant in options trading.
3. Allow manual creation of trend lines, projections, my own selection of resistance and support levels.
4. Technical analysis of market data - e.g. showing candlesticks and other more complex analyses.
5. Real-time trading data - what is happening right now in the market, showing current trading price ranges, trading volumes.
6. Real time market news - prices can react rapidly to market news, both up and down, so it's important to know what is happening to the companies you are investing in or planning to invest in.
7. Automatic recognition of potential patterns, such as double tops, double bottoms, head-and-shoulders etc. It would be useful to have your attention drawn to the occurrence of these well-known patterns, so you can then make your judgement as to the future movement of the price.
8. Price movement alerts - the ability to specify price levels that you want to reach to trigger selling, moving up or down. These alerts would indicate you had reached your target profit level (hopefully) or your maximum acceptable loss level.
9. Automated trade submissions - the ability to specify conditions under which you want to submit a buy or sell trade, depending on the price of stocks or options you specify, or even depending on price movements. For instance, you might submit your call options for sale once they have passed above a set value, if they subsequently fall by an amount you specify.
10. Accounting - a continuous valuation of your portfolio, and also a historical report of cash in and out of your account, and purchases and sales of stocks and options showing profits and losses per trade, per day/week/month.
A fundamental part of what you need for trading is actually the source of information, not just the means to make trades. In my list above I mentioned numerous data requirements - real time market data, real-time news etc. Your choice of trading software must take into account the availability of this data and the cost of providing it. If you are going to trade seriously, you will need real-time data with no time delay, whereas many of the 'free' data streams are actually delayed by 15 minutes or more. In fact, you might get your Stock Option Trading Software included in the account for the provision of the real-time data.
How do you keep track of your profits (and losses)? How do you pick your next investment, or decide to get out of a position? Pencil and paper? A spreadsheet? Your online trading account? There may be a better way - using special-purpose software for all of these tasks.
What could this software to do for you? Here's 10 things I would want from my software package:
1. Historical reports of the status of the stocks I am interested in - if I trade stocks this is obviously important. If I trade options, it's just as important to know the progress of the underlying stocks before making buy/sell decisions.
2. Automatically show trends, resistance levels, support levels - turning points are very significant in options trading.
3. Allow manual creation of trend lines, projections, my own selection of resistance and support levels.
4. Technical analysis of market data - e.g. showing candlesticks and other more complex analyses.
5. Real-time trading data - what is happening right now in the market, showing current trading price ranges, trading volumes.
6. Real time market news - prices can react rapidly to market news, both up and down, so it's important to know what is happening to the companies you are investing in or planning to invest in.
7. Automatic recognition of potential patterns, such as double tops, double bottoms, head-and-shoulders etc. It would be useful to have your attention drawn to the occurrence of these well-known patterns, so you can then make your judgement as to the future movement of the price.
8. Price movement alerts - the ability to specify price levels that you want to reach to trigger selling, moving up or down. These alerts would indicate you had reached your target profit level (hopefully) or your maximum acceptable loss level.
9. Automated trade submissions - the ability to specify conditions under which you want to submit a buy or sell trade, depending on the price of stocks or options you specify, or even depending on price movements. For instance, you might submit your call options for sale once they have passed above a set value, if they subsequently fall by an amount you specify.
10. Accounting - a continuous valuation of your portfolio, and also a historical report of cash in and out of your account, and purchases and sales of stocks and options showing profits and losses per trade, per day/week/month.
A fundamental part of what you need for trading is actually the source of information, not just the means to make trades. In my list above I mentioned numerous data requirements - real time market data, real-time news etc. Your choice of trading software must take into account the availability of this data and the cost of providing it. If you are going to trade seriously, you will need real-time data with no time delay, whereas many of the 'free' data streams are actually delayed by 15 minutes or more. In fact, you might get your Stock Option Trading Software included in the account for the provision of the real-time data.
Source...