Steve, Welcome to the amibroker community. Let me throw my 2c for whats worth.
Basically there are two types of charting software out in the market. 1) Scanning software with prebuilt rules and generates buy/sell signals. You will find a boatload of them on the market. They use pre-defined strategies and once you punch in all your symbols they can generate buy/sell signals for you. 2) Second type is the charting/analytics software - These include Amibroker,Tradestation and several others that let YOU define the strategy and then help you find the candidates. Lets say you are a position trader, you may want to look for strategies that use the eod long term trending models such as 10day ema crossing above 50day ema etc just to quote an example. So what Amibroker does is to empower you to code strategy you have in mind. I transitioned from AIQ software to Amibroker primariliy because of the Flexibility it gives me.... I love the product and it has been a fun learning curve. http://www.amibroker.com/guide/afl/afl_index.php?m=1 Its pretty much upto the individual now to come up with ideas to use these functions to get the best out of it. You can combine daily/weekly data...Get free eod quotes and boatload of other goodies. After researching so many products out there, I am yet to come across one that gives you the toolkit like Amibroker. and their SUPPORT IS THE BEST I HAVE EVER SEEN FROM any charting software vendor on planet earth. If you run into any issue during coding and if you need help amibroker user community is here to help....and support can assist too. There are lot of inteliget people here on this list as well as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Occassionaly you may see some weirdos cussing users to RTFM...but those are just exceptions...for the most part, you get very good help from amibroker user group here. I am attaching few links so that you can spend some time looking at various systems that are already posted by the amibroker user community. http://www.amibroker.com/library/list.php This should give you a jump start you are looking for. You may also want to check out http://www.amibroker.com/at/ which talks about automated trading. Hope this helps. thanks. Cheers,Padhu
