#127 - Best Websites For Technical Analysis Software
Hey everyone, this is Kirk here again at Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, we’re going to talk about the best websites for technical analysis software. I’ll actually begin this with two comments because I think it's important before we go through some of these sites and we’ll just briefly talk about them. They’re not all free sites, although some of them offer a lot of free services. Obviously, when you get more data and you get more access to features, in some of the cases, you might have to upgrade to a paid version. On that note, two quick comments on this. One, I think in general, you should just use your brokerage platform for your technical analysis because it's in most cases, already integrated to your broker platform, whoever you’re using. They’ll probably have some sort of charting feature already. They probably already have technical analysis and in most cases, it has a lot more customization options. You can change links, you can change average periods, you can change overbought, oversold levels versus some of the other software that’s online that we’ve been researching for you guys, has pretty much fixed settings. You have to go with that platform’s setup or the way that they setup the trade, the way that they calculate averages, things like that. On that note though, the second thing is you have to know which technical indicators to use. There are so many out there that really just don’t frankly work. One of the ones that I love to harp on all the time because we've done such extensive back-testing on it is the simple moving average. Simple moving average, although I see it all over the place… Actually, it was just recently quoted in MSNBC just the other day. Somebody was on, talking about how a particular stock was breaking its 200-day moving average and I’m thinking to myself, “That means absolutely nothing because the simple moving average is frankly one of the worst indicators out there that you can use as a directional indicator of where the stock is going.” We tested everything from 10-day and 20-day, all the way up to 200-day moving averages, crosses the 50-day moving average above the 200, the 100, above the 200. I mean, we tested everything and frankly, it just doesn't work. It doesn't generate enough consistent, reliable results to be used as a true indicator for your trading, whether you’re trading stocks or options really doesn't matter. On that note, obviously make sure you’re using the right indicators. If you want to see the research that we did on 17 different indicators, hundreds of different stocks, millions of different trades that we basically tracked over 20 years, you can head on over to optionalpha.com/signals and that’s our signals research report that we offer. Again, optionalpha.com/signals. Here’s the thing. I’ll go maybe in order of the ones that I like, just to really start off with. I think the best one out there is TradingView as far as technical analysis software and just interactive charting. They’ve got a pretty good community there as well and the features are very easy to use. It’s a very simple platform to use. We actually partnered up with TradingView and integrated TradingView charts into our system at Option Alpha for our trading alerts, so when you see a chart, that’s probably a TradingView chart for us. I think TradingView is a really good one to start with. The next one probably I would say is ChartIQ. ChartIQ is very similar to TradingView as far as how they setup everything, but again, a very simple platform to use, very easy, you don’t have to jump through a lot of hoops basically to get to the charting software and to get to the studies. In their case, they don’t have too many different studies that you can tweak and adjust along the way. You have to use their settings for the most part. There’s a couple of studies that you can adjust and tweak, but for the most part, you have to use what they give you and that’s obviously a little bit limiting. The next one I think that’s really good is charts.com. This is probably the original website or one of the most original websites that are out there. They’ve been around forever and they’ve really started to improve their charting software. I just don't particularly like the way that it looks. I still think it looks old and feels old and I’m definitely a stickler for design and user-experience and user-feel. Technology wise, I think it’s fine and I think they pull in all the right stuff. They’ve been doing this for years. But as far as looks and functionality, I just prefer something else. The last one is Finviz. I say Finviz because I don’t know, I’m on Finviz now and one of those stupid video ads popped up, so I apologize. On Finviz, they have a lot of features for the ability to actually back-test and tweak some of your studies which is good. It’s a paid feature to do that, so it costs a little bit of money to have the ability to back-test some of these and to tweak some of these indicators. We’ve already done this for you in the signals research. We didn't use Finviz to do this. We used a bunch of other different things. We’ve built our own software to do it. But I think it’s a good resource for you. They get a lot more in-depth to things like insider trading, insider trades. They do a lot of charting and analysis on dividends or cash to book ratios. I mean, there’s a lot more in there than you possibly need on Finviz which is why it’s not the top of my list, but I think it’s decent. You can definitely check it out. They’ve got some good technical indicators that are auto-imported into their platform. Hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys have any comments or questions, let me know. Until next time, happy trading!