Comments - from a new user

I am a computer programmer, so I speak as one who understands a bit how well Bullcharts is written. I would personally be proud of it if it was my work. But like everything, there can be improvements, and I fully intent to tell you what I think they should be!!

I have looked at and tried many trading platforms, almost everything you can find. Metastock, FChartsPro, InsightTrader, ProTrader, IC-Investor, Fibonacci Trader, Candlepower 6, Candlestick Samuari, Market Analyst, AmiBroker, Tradestation 2000i, eAscTrend, Omnitrader, Gannanalyst, Deep Insight, EzStock, Master Investor and no doubt one or two more that I cannot recall. Suffice to say that I have seen the whole gamut from fairly average to very good.

My actual favourite trading platform is FChartPro. This is a very cheap ($100) system that has very few bells - but it is written by an active trader who uses it every day. And it shows - it has every feature that a trader would use every single day. It does not have the hundreds of indicators that really very few of us use or even understand. But there are problems with FChartPro - the data connection for one (it is free from yahoo.com). And the scanner is not very flexible, etc.

So I bought IC-Investor (which is even more expensive than Metastock and Bullcharts). It has some very good fundamental data as part of the data feed. Probably not much more than BullCharts, but the package is defiinitely not written by trders - it is very poorly written and has a lot of very annoying quirks. But technically fairly good. Amd it has a reasonable (not good) portfolio manager. The scanner is fairly average and is not really programmable.

I also use Metastock, but while it is fairly powerful, the data structure is poorly designed. But a very good program. I would say that it was not written by traders - but it has been polished over the years so that it does actually work fairly well.

I looked at Bullcharts because none of the software I had easily gave me trading candidates. ie the scanners were not very good. Once I brought a chart up, they are all pretty much the same - with Tradestation 2000i giving the best charts (visually). This is important if you are trying to find patterns in charts, and FChartPro is also excellent for this. IC-Investor has terrible looking charts. So while I had already spent a fortune on software, I was still not happy.

Bullcharts attracted me initialy mainly due to the fact that there really was nothing else to try. I had been using Marketscan from Paritech to find growth stocks based on fundamentals - and while Marketscan works fairly well - what do you do with the resultant lists you get?  Type them into your main charting program? No - there had to be a better way.

Bullcharts seemed to have a very good scanner - which also included a fair few fundamental ratios. Nothing as good as MarketScan, but fairly adequate. And it looked as good as FChartPro. And probably as good as Tradestation - and it may even be better.

So things looked good. Had I found the Holy Grail of software? Not really. It was the very devil to install - it probably took me 4 hours or so to finally get the trialware version to work. It is also slow to load initially. But once loaded it is great. Very good looking system.

So whiile I am extremely positive about the package - it has a few problems - I am still concerned about a few things.

- I need to install the system to my backup computer. I still need to trade if my main computer dies. This is really not possible. For a start, I use Windows 98 on that system, and that is not supported by Bullcharts. And even if it was, who wants to spend 3 or 4 hours installing one package? And since I seem to re-install Windows every 6 months, this potential problem alone sends me pale.

- reliabilty of the trading platform. Since it was so hard for me to get the MS SQL server to install (which is no problem of Bullcharts, of course), I have no faith at all that it will keep working. We all know how reliable Microsoft software is, don't we?

- there are no portfolio or backtesting functions in Bullcharts. I don't mind the backtesting bit as that is a erally specialised field, so they should leave that to the specialists. But basic protfolio functions would seem to me to be mandatory. At least there should be Position Sizing calculators.

- I already have a paid up data service and expensive software. Why should I double up with yet another service and package?

Balanced against all these considerations is the fact that this software seems to be written by a team of very helpful people. I do not know if they are traders, but it seems very likely that they are. Support is always very quick (unlike with IC-Investor, which is quite poor). I even got a support email back today - which is a Saturday. You cannot complain about that.

The other HUGE thing - and it is sthe same with FChartPro - you can actually talk to the programmer(s) to get something done. With FChartPro there is only one guy - I have had a suggestion implemented by him within hours and the new version up on the web. That is brilliant! 

While I do not know if Bullcharts is as resposnive to user comments as that (let us hope!), but at least there is a feeling that they might actually implement useful suggestions. I have no such illusions with IC-Investor or Metastock.

There is no real point to this post - I simply wanted to clarify in my own mind the issues as far as I was concerned. Talking about it here hopefully has done that. Hopefully other potential purchasers might find my comments useful.

And of course I want to be convinced that purchasing yet another software package (Bullcharts) is the correct thing to do.

I agree with Simon all the way.

Fantastic product with fantastic support.

Supporting me/98 would be a waste of resources. Can understand you focusing on XP.

Obviously - if it all works - there is not a problem. What if the wizards do NOT work (as in my case). If I was a normal user, I would never have been able to install MS SQL Desktop. I would probably have reinstalled Windows XP to fix the problem. The problem is not with Bullcharts - the problem is with Windows and MS SQL Desktop.

Trust me - being "state of the art" is NO recommendation in the computer world. Windows XP is a good example. Given the choice, I would much rather go back to W2K - that was a much better system. My main machine is a Windows XP box. That is where I had the nightmare of installing MS SQL Desktop. I have a Windows 98 machine that is my backup hardware. It is my backup system, with a backup data feed and charting software. Unfortunately (I guess), I cannot install BC on that machine. I am simply using FChartPro on that one.

Well, I have certainly bought BC. It is great. Position sizing tools are really fairly simple - hardly even worth a spreadsheet tool. I am using a calculator at the moment. It should be no big deal to put one into BC - a few hours work at the most.

And as for there being more important things to work on - I am sure you are right. But money management is the mark of a good trader - what could be more important than that?

Well, that is exactly what I did. I posed that question more to myself - I had to justify spending yet another $1,000 or so - and this has become a fairly regular thing of late.

The data side of BC is one of the other (apart from MS SQL) big drawbacks. Being locked into a proprietry data provider is not generally a good thing. And there are no export functions at all.

Still, I took the plunge, and I could not have been happier. BC has been a great tool. I certainly recommend it to all my trader collegues.

Don't mistake me - I am no novice at this. I have been in the computer industry some 28 years. I have installed every version of Windows known - many hundreds of times over. So I don't particularly need any help.