Hello,
I am trying to decide between these three charting packages and would be interested in comments from those of you who have used one or more of them.
I am with FXCM (which I like) but their charting package lacks a lot of the things I need (alerts, custom indicators, etc.).
Thanks,
PD
I’ve been using ProRealTime’s platform for a week now and am pretty much in love with it. It has similar features to Tradestation but won’t break your piggy bank. It’s all in Java and is initiated from their website, so all of your chart setups, indicators, and settings can follow you from computer to computer. They offer easy switching between multiple saved layouts as well as a indicator and back-testing programming language that I have found very useful. You can set alerts on the indicators and they persist even when you close the chart or switch to another currency, so you don’t have to worry about missing anything (I didn’t realize this until yesterday; up until then I just kept open 8 windows for each pair I was monitoring!) The alerts are both visual and can include a sound effect of your choice. There are different sound effects for going long, short, stop, and limit. ProRealTime can be set to loop the sound effect. I use this feature with a very loud and obnoxious siren noise in order to drag me out of bed when a profitable opportunity strikes at 3:45 AM :-).
ProRealTime also has this ‘ProScreener’ option that you can program to look for certain conditions like candle stick formations, MA crossovers, and much more and will list all of the pairs meeting the criteria in any order you choose. It also supports multiple screens as each window is independent.
Contact with them has been pretty quick with average response times around a few hours. My real-time feed was live within a minute as soon as my credit card payment was processed.
The charting software has tons of drawing tools and everything you’d expect from the higher priced packaging, with the exception of some painting options. Fibonacci, Andrews Pitch Fork, trend lines, you name it.
The company is apparently constantly updating the software and I have made at least three recommendations of features to add. So far I’ve requested the ability to link charts by color-coding (similar to eSignal and Tradestation), a programming feature to look at other securities and time-frames within another time-frame (such as referencing an hourly chart on a 10-minute chart for stronger signals), and more ProScreener windows as they only allow one to be open at the moment.
With me lavishing so much praise on the application, you’d think it were flawless. Let me introduce you to a few negatives, which I’m sure will be removed in time through their updates and enough bug reports :-).
As I said, the application is a Java applet and it can be quite memory intensive. I have observed between 200 and 250 megs of memory consumed while it’s running. Last night, while I had alerts set on my custom indicator on the pairs that I trade, the data feed apparently stopped updating my windows. I reported this bug but have not yet heard back. I missed an opportunity because of this. It occurred in their beta version, and not the stable, so I am not sure if this is a new issue or if it occurs in the current offering as well. The software can be awkward when it comes to minimizing windows as, on my computer, the entire application will minimize to the task bar.
I’d highly recommend ProRealtime’s software if you like a lot of power and customization in your charting platform. Just make sure to look through their manuals to discover all that can be done!
Warm Regards,
egonline
Thanks for the reply. I actually started my subscription with ProRealTime yesterday when my trial ran out.
Like you, the more I use it, the more I like it!
Thanks again,
PD
I just checked out this site and they offer unlimited use of their software if you only want end of day data. I am trying it out that way as it seems to have many useful scanning features to identify longer term trends. Nice software, thanks for that information.
Hi, I have been using ProRealTime for the last few months or so with the free end-of-day data.
I really like the automatically drawn support and resistance lines and that you can get many different markets on the same platform. Are you guys still using the real-time version?