Tools Selector Guide
Time Frames

The first question in determining your needs is whether you wish to carry out your analysis in real time data (intraday) or whether after market close is a more suitable time.

For most people, this process is dictated by their current employment status. If currently full time employed, most Investors find it difficult to find the time during the day to do their current job, much less, do any analysis or monitoring of their stocks. Generally speaking, Real Time analysis software is best suited to people that have the ability to sit in front of their computer during most of the trading day and apply full concentration to the markets. Based on the relatively high costs of these products and time required to perform analysis, Trading would be the prime source of income focus for many of these people. Examples of these would be Day-Traders, the self employed and shift workers.

End of Day analysis software is suited to Traders that prefer to analyse the market on a delayed basis. This decision may be either due to time constraints imposed by factors such as other employment, or even more basic reasons, such as lifestyle choice.
 
Not for one minute though are we suggesting that End of Day trading is potentially any less a lucrative trading methodology than Real Time. In many cases, it has been shown that Real Time (or Day-Traders) can get too close to their trading, and start making decisions based on human factors other than logic. For example, greed, excitement and boredom. And the classic one, the latest hot tip on a day traders chat site.

Click here for a breakdown of the best selling real time and end of day analysis programs available globally. Note that some software programs, like MetaStock and OmniTrader, have both a real time and end of day version.