MetaStock

The most user-friendly software is MetaStock by Equis (www.equis.com). It comes with preset indicators, user guide, and data to get you started.

Barbara Rockerfeller, Technical Analysis for Dummies

Currency Profits March 2003 Review: MetaStock 8.0

The reason that MetaStock is still here, while many of its competitors have gone to that great trading room in the sky, is that the people at MetaStock are not content with state of the art – they are always pushing the edge.

With a few clicks of our mouse you download daily and historical data for virtually any stock and/or any futures contract traded throughout the world. A few more clicks and you can draw just about any type chart you could imagine – bar, candlestick, line, and even more.

MetaStock features Power Tools that let your computer sort through literally thousands of potential traded, narrowing them to the few that meet your predetermined criteria. It includes 26 tested Performance Trading systems to get you started. There are another 28 available at extra cost as plugins.

The expert advisor is a great learning tool. You will learn how to interpret all those seemingly esoteric indicators, systems, and trading approaches from the very people who created them! The commentaries are verbal and written. Simply draw a chart of your choice, right click your mouse, and select an Expert Advisor.

You can’t go wrong with MetaStock products. It earned our highest rating: the 4 stars of excellence!

Barron’s December 23, 2004 Pleasing Your Inner Technical Analyst Edited by Randall W. Forsyth

The programmers at Equis were early converts to drag-and-drop functionality, so you’ll find that your mouse is the key to building customized charts. MetaStock has a huge arsenal of analysis and charting tools that can keep any technical analyst happy.

Much of the power of MetaStock comes from the indicators, which are mathematical calculations that can be applied to a security’s price, volume or even another indicator. There are now more than 150 indicators and line studies built in to the program, including Fibonacci fans, a Relative Strength index, plus trend lines. Once you determine a set of indicators that make sense to you, you can save them in a template that can be easily applied to any security.

A couple of years ago, the company released a programmer’s toolkit, so in the event the program doesn’t contain the analytical nuances you want, you may find it as a plug-in that can be purchased from Equis or from the programmer.

These plug-ins include Nison’s Candlesticks Unleashed – chart-patterning techniques for generating buy and sell signals – and the Bollinger Band System, which expands on the capabilities built in to the program to generate watch lists of stocks that are trading candidates.

Technology for TRADERS March 2003 Software SCREENING: MetaStock Professional 8.0 Reviewed by David Bukey

Sometimes too much of a good thing can be counterproductive, but in this case MetaStock retains its reputation for being accessible to beginning and intermediate users while offering sophisticated features for experienced users.

MetaStock includes nine chart styles: bar, candlestick, equivolume, line, candlevolume, kagi, point-and-figure, renko and three-line break. Time periods are daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly. Intraday time periods can be set to any interval, down to one minute.

Great charting features and expansive indicator and line study menus. Portfolio system testing and optimization makes the program more appealing to advanced users. Object-oriented design makes the program easy to use.

The Enhanced System Tester allows you to back-test pre-programmed or original trading systems on historical price data. Improved navigation and graphics make it easier to use and interpret. It also can now account for slippage by reducing the profit of each trade by a small amount or percentage. It has the ability to test multiple systems on multiple-security portfolios instead of just one stock or contract at a time.

The Expert Advisor provides market commentary and analysis, tracks buy and sell signals and issues alerts based on trading systems designed by Equis or several outside contributors. Alerts can either appear onscreen or can be sent to an e-mail address or cell phone. Setting up the expert advisor to monitor charts for trading signals is easy and works on any time frame.

Installing MetaStock is fast and hassle free. The upgrade from version 7.2 took less than 10 minutes and worked seamlessly with existing files.

MetaStock has expanded some of its options, improved some of its advanced features, and kept its intuitive and reliable charting environment intact. It remains a very reasonably priced, well designed analysis platform that has features for a wide range of skill levels. Its charting, analysis and data management functions are all user-friendly and efficient.

Technology for TRADERS September 2004 Software SCREENING: MetaStock Professional 9.0 Reviewed by David Bukey

MetaStock Pro is known for its intuitive charting environment, but recent upgrades have strengthened its system-testing and market scanning abilities.

MetaStock 9.0 adds to each of its four main comments and now includes a chat room where users can share ideas and contact technical support. The latest release also features automatic support, resistance, trend lines and new indicators and includes point-and-figure analysis tools.

The MetaStock interface remains object-oriented, allowing users to perform many tasks by dragging and dropping screen objects or right-clicking on any item.

MetaStock allows you to overlay monetary (i.e. interest rates, metals and currencies) and market index data (NYSE and Nasdaq Composite) in any chart to assess specific securities relative to several market barometers and benchmarks.

There are 14 monetary indicators, including fixed income benchmarks (13-and 26-week T-Bills, Fed Funds rate, Prime Rate, 30-year T-bond), metals (gold and silver) and currencies (Euro and Japanese Yen exchange rates). MetaStock also uses this data to calculate other indicators such as the T-bill yield spread, interest-rate rate of change, gold/silver ratio, and short- and medium-term composite indicies.

MetaStock’s NYSE and Nasdaq Composite formulas focus on price momentum and examine each index’s rate of change, volume, advancing and declining issues, new highs and lows, and moving averages. There are also 36 indicators that can be overlaid on a chart, ranging from the Absolute Breadth Index, a measure of price change that ignores market direction, to the stochastic oscillator.

The Explorer is a market-scanning tool that searches for stocks with specific characteristics – any number of indicator based criteria or user-defined rules. The new version of MetaStock allows you to find securities that have penetrated short and long-term support, resistance and trend lines. The Expert Advisor, which provides market analysis, commentary, and buy and sell signals, explains each line’s significance.

MetaStock’s chat area lets users discuss the market and share charts in different topic rooms, You can start a new conversation in a public or private room.

The chat window is also a convenient way to reach technical support and MetaStock has planned weekly, one-hour Web chats, labeled Expert Symposiums, with market gurus such as John Bollinger, Mark Klink, Stephen Cooper and Michael A. Mermer.

You can now copy MetaStock’s historical data CD onto your hard drive in one step. This process takes a few minutes, but it’s worth it because explorations are much quicker with local data than when scanning a real-time vendor’s database, especially when using multiple securities and years of price data.

MetaStock 9.0 organizes stocks into industry folders such as health care, financials, energy and transportation that allow you to run market scans and tests on companies in specific sectors.

Performance Systems Plus

MetaStock Performance Systems Plus — Our Rating 9/10

We found the Performance Systems Plus plug-in provided a number of valuable new indicators, tests and explorations that easily made it worth the sticker price of $299.

Matt Blackman, TheChartMaster.com

John Murphy’s Chart Pattern Recognition

The module is very easy to use, and for those traders interested in better understanding, identifying and trading classic chart patterns, CPR offers the kind of hands-on experience that can shorten your learning curve considerably.

Active Trader, March 2002

I like the pattern choices available in CPR. CPR is a solid product that performs very well.

Dennis Peterson, Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities, February 2002

We found CPR useful in a number of ways besides the most obvious of alerting us to chart patterns being formed or confirmed. Using indicators such as the stochastic RSI. we often found that a forming pattern either reinforced our decision to buy or sell, or caused us to do more homework on stocks that gave conflicting signals.

Overall, we found the program to be a valuable asset to our technical charting toolbox as well as providing a fun way to learn about chart patterns. All in all, a job well done by John Murphy and the people at Equis, earning an A+ rating.

Matt Blackman, TheChartMaster.com

John Bollinger’s Bollinger Band® System

A variety of rules have been put forward for trading Bollinger Bands and, in this system, John Bollinger himself has combined them with money flow, trend strength, volatility, and volume patterns. Then he, Equis, and Adaptick found a way to make the entire structure adaptive.

John Sweeney, Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities, September 2001

We found that the program performed quite respectably on stocks that it identified, proving to be a worthwhile addition to our system of tools. We gave it an overall rating of 8/10. Like the MetaStock Chart Pattern Recognition(TM) plug-in, the BBS is useful in giving a heads up on stocks that are getting ready to make a move. We also found the BBS — b% Indicator Builder of great help in confirming the continuation of short-term trends.

Matt Blackman, TheChartMaster.com

Trade Oracle

Use of the package is straightforward, and since all the code is written in C and then incorporated as dynamic link libraries (DLL), it is also fast. However, this also means you can’t see the code directly on your screen. All references are to ExtFml — that is, external formula. However, a manual is provided that shows the MetaStock code. Let me say again at the outset that this tool can make you money.

Dennis D Peterson. Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities, February 2005