Recently I have re-installed Metastock 10 stock charting program on one of my computers running Ubuntu linux. In case you are thinking “Metastock 10 does not run on Linux”, let me clarify…I am running the stock charting program in a VMWare image of Windows XP. The funny thing is a message comes up when I start Metastock that says something like “This program does not run in virtual machines” however, everything seems to work fine.
If you are not familiar with Metastock 10, it is a powerful charting program for stock and foreign exchange, and there is a real-time version and a End-of-Day (EOD) stock price version. What makes Metastock powerful is it’s long list of indicators and formulas, which you can customize yourself to match your trading sytle.
When I was swing trading full-time 3 years ago, I use Metastock 10 consistently with EOD quotes for my stock watchlist. The available indicators and formula’s helped me find trade opportunities within my stock watchlist for swing trades. Although this charting tool will not help you identify trades buy and sell points all the time, it still is better than having no tool. In the end, it is up to you to discipline your trigger finger. For serious traders Metastock is a must.
The main reason I am re-visiting Metastock is for the fact that I think there is going to be another decline in the stock market after this euphoric run up that we have had over the past few months. Like a runner, who runs a marathon, he/she cannot do this by holding his/her breath. The runner will have to at one time exhale, and the same goes for the market, it will have to take a break soon. When it does, then that is when I will be looking to use Metastock to find stocks that have taken a beating, and about to bottom out, ripe for swing trading.
To get stock price data for use in Metastock charting program there are a few choices. Since, I am using Metastock End-of-Day stock prices, I can either subscribe to services which offer EOD data in Metastock format like Reuters DataLink or I can use FREE services such as Yahoo quotes. However,if you use Yahoo quotes, it only downloads as .csv format, which you will have to convert somehowso it is readable in Metastock charting program. From my research this is not that hard, but it will be a big hassle if you got hundreds of stocks to track. There is a program called “MLDownloader” that will download all the stock prices of your portfolio list directly into MetaStock chart program format, however my license for the product ran out, and I will be writing my own Windows program to do this.
In the coming future, I will probably write a few more post / articles on how I’m using Metastock and the trade opportunities that Metastock has helped me identify.
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