what would you recommend? appreciate sharing of your experiences using off the shelf software, that allows building of customized studies to scan on a universe of stocks so far, have narrowed the search to multicharts (~1500usd lifetime) + iq feed (150usd upwards/mth). understand that one needs to pay the entrance fee to play background: zero programming knowledge. discretionary trader interested to be alerted, whenever an asset trades within x% of its past y swing points (on daily & intraday). currently have limited time. will start out paying to build custom study for scan, & eventually the diy route multicharts (standard) multicharts' easylanguage will allow for customised coding. however, have found the only usable/value real-time universe of stock feed is iq's. also quite a hassle to manually import the universe of stock symbols. esignal's feed is good, but overpriced sierra charts m a sierra charts user on futures & really like their custom study/alert/ chart trading features. sc is ideal if their crappy scanner was more functional over a universe of symbols. sc caters to the futures crowd & is hopeless for stocks other software esignal - overpriced. comparatively harder for non-programmer to build custom scan have ruled tradestation (us) out, as it is limited to us stocks. tradestation (global, ib partnership) is limited to ib data, which is crippling. eg. pacing violation, 1yr historical data. comm structure is like a telecom offering discounted handsets on higher recurring mthly fees. uncertainty how long partnership will last. multicharts & ib had a partnership that ran for a few years amibroker seems to be favoured for its customizable backtesting, & not so great for real-time scanning. easylanguage seems to be friendly to non-programmers vs amibroker's code metastock seems to be comparable to multicharts. fees seem higher than multicharts. their pricing page is not clear whether certain charges r monthly/annual recurring or one-time. programming syntax does not seem geared towards non-programmers
Do you want realtime or end of day? Google technifilter plus or the explorer in metastock will do it for end of day. Www.trade-ideas.com realtime for us stocks. The scanner in interactivebrokers TWS mosaic will do it for every market in the world, realtime, for free, just need to fund an account. No programming language just have to define logic. I can sell you or anyone else a copy of multicharts for half price. Pm me.
I wouldn’t throw out Amibroker and IQFeed out as an option. ( I use yahoo and TC2000 for EOD) As far as stocks go where I flip through 500 plus charts at EOD, it’s the best I’ve used. The great thing about it for stocks is how easy it is to manage sectors, industries, markets, groups and watch lists. Analysis window exploration and scan is quick, can easily export scan results to a watchlist where you can quickly flip through charts. I remember trying ninja trader and muktichsrtd for a bit but managing symbols wasn’t intuitive. Never looked into it much. Amibroker importing symbol lists is as simple as having a .csv or .txt with commas to get them into the database or import to a watchlist. IQFeed can get pricey though at 80$ plus exchange fees then 50$ per extra 500 symbols.( base is 500 Real-time). I’ve never tried Qcollector but it is a tool you can use to manage a database from IQFeed. Supposedly even with 500 symbol limit it will basically dump symbols from the 500 limit in API as it’s downloaded and refresh with new symbol. Great for managing a EOD database for whatever software you want afterwards.
MotiveWave has a built-in Study Scanner, which allows you to use any combination of the 275+ built-in studies we have, as well as the ability to use any custom studies you create through our free Java SDK (we can put you in touch with a programmer who can give you a quote for your custom study, if you don't want to build it yourself). You can scan as many stocks as you want based on the specific Study/Studies criteria you've chosen. We support 30+ brokers and data service providers including IQFeed.