If you have been trading the forex for long you have probably realized it’s not always as easy as many of us thought it would be. Many of us decided to learn how to forex trade with the hope of easy money. But what we ended up with is hours of watching charts and stressing out about our trades or whether we were going to miss a trade after hours of waiting for the set up. Trading can be a frustrating experience, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

The sad fact is most traders actually lose money trading the forex. Trading a 24 hour market can be difficult. The 24 hour market is often advertised as one of the advantages of the forex but I think it can be more of a disadvantage. The problem is you can’t watch the markets 24 hours a day and it can be hard to sleep at night when you are worried about what your trades might be doing. This is especially true for those of us in the western time zones where a lot of the market activity happens at night while we are asleep.

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In a volatile and turbulent market, technical traders can find confidence in their trades by using one of the many stock market analysis software programs currently available. These programs utilize market analysis strategies, such as charting, back testing, optimization and scanning. Charting involves the using of charts to predict market movements and spot opportunities. Back testing enables a trader to test timing strategies against the historical price movements, with performance measurements such as the Sharpe ratio taken into account. Optimization optimizes technical market analysis parameters to generate maximum returns based upon historical price movements. Scanning involves “scanning” the markets for opportunities that meet the investment criteria of the user.

TradeStation, developed by TradeStation Securities, provides both research and trading. The support system allows the small investor to have the same advantages as large scale technical traders. Using the EasyLanguage programming language, TradeStation enables the use of both pre-defined and custom-made indicators that meet the user’s investment criteria. Version 8.4 is the current version of TradeStation. It provides real time data only for the US markets and the German DAX exchange. The pros of the software include the ability to monitor multiple markets and automatically execute trading ideas. Cons include the lack of real time data on European and Asian markets. Hardware requirements include minimum RAM of 128mb and minimum hard drive space of 75mb. TradeStation costs $59.95 a month for RadarScreen real-time scanning and $99.95 a month for the base platform.

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