More stock analysis software for the Mac OS

On Sept. 22 and Sept. 28 we ran a series on stock analysis software for the Mac platform. Since then we’ve learned of still more applications that fall into this category.

Equity Miner

Equity Miner is a stock screener from HardHat Software. It’s currently being tested in a trial evaluation and public beta test. You can learn more at the product Web site.

A stockscreener is software that enables an investor to search a database of stocks (publicly traded companies) for those stocks which match supplied search criteria. The search criteria are typically those employed in “fundamental analysis,” such as price-to-earnings ratio, earnings growth rates, etc.

IQChart

IQChart is a real-time charting program. IQChart has a built-in stock screener. The app’s real-time technical charts update automatically every minute throughout the trading day. They can be customized by size, scale, shape, frequency, design and other indicators.

Dynamic intraday charts show the market in action. You can get one-minute chart intervals, in addition to five, 15, 30 and 60-minute intervals. Historical daily, weekly and monthly charts go back to 1968. Detailed real-time quotes are also available, including the price, volume, bid/ask price and fundamental information.

IQ Chart Real-Time Data costs US$34.95 per month, including exchange fees. The IQ Chart Delayed Data is $24.95 per month.

Tradex

MacCentral reader Charlie Sheils recommends Tradex by iLanga Software. It’s a “fat Classic” app that runs on a Mac as slow as a 68020 system.

Trade Strategist

Drew McCormack is currently developing a small piece of freeware written exclusively in Cocoa for use only with Mac OS X. The program, which is still in a relatively early stage of development, will be called Trade Strategist. It’s intended to be technical analysis software “for the rest of us,” McCormack said.

“It will include all of the major technical indicators, and will enable the user to build trading models — or strategies — and test their effectiveness on historical data downloaded from the Web,” he told MacCentral. “Results and price data will be chartable. The user can test trading strategies they already use, develop new and better strategies and swap strategies with other Trade Strategist users.

Early releases of “Trade Strategist” should be available for free download early in 2002.

Wolfram Research

Wolfram Research makes two applications worth a peek. Finance Essentials is specifically designed for traders, investment analysts, portfolio managers and others in the financial community with critical tasks in data analysis and strategy design. It can be used to build customized proprietary applications, test and evaluate trading and hedging strategies and evaluate assets using the CAPM.

Finance Essentials provides a foundation of financial objects (such as cash flow, option, bond and interest rates) and functions (such as spot-forward rate conversions, option valuation and sensitivity measures). Its tools and examples, when combined with Wolfram’s Mathematica’s high-level programming language, can slash development costs, according to the folks at Wolfram.

Technical Trader is for testing and implementing financial trading systems, offering tools and techniques that let users prototype an entire trading system in a single language. Users can make rapid modifications to any part of your system without having to maintain more than one set of code.

Tools in Technical Trader help you remove noise and clarify the underlying characteristics of your data, according to Wolfram. The tools include three types of moving averages: high-order exponential, center weighted and simple. For importing, Technical Trader reads historic ASCII data, CSI data, and MetaStock data. You can also condense your data to chart weekly or monthly trends.

Both products have a variety of pricing options, depending on whether you’re a commercial, academic or student user.