# Looks like a nice tool...



## moola (25 August 2006)

Well someone called me up and tried to sell me some trading tool for 6K. I had to laugh, but only after noting down exactly what it does. Anyway, it's worked out good because it's finally got me off my butt to seriously consider trading (something that I've been meaning to do since I did year 10 business maths where we made up fake portfolios to follow for a semester). So I thank who ever the scamming marketing freaks who thought up that scheme are.

A quick 5 minute search of the net turned up this thing called eclipsetrader, has anyone ever played with it? At first I thought that it wasn't configured to work for the All Ords because there were some big bright buttons for Italli, France, Germany and the US, and also no AUD currency is selectable by default. I kept looking and found incrediblecharts (actually from this forum), which also craps all over the product that was being touted in terms of value. But today I went back and had another look at eclipsetrader and managed to get it to work. If anyone wants to have a look, here's how you configure it:

From the menu select Edit | Preferences. Navigate to General | Currencies and then check Australia (If you uncheck all the rest then AUD will be the default).

Also you might want to click on Startup and Shutdown and select "Update history on startup".

Now you can create you're account and specify brokers fees for transactions.

Everything will be blank, from here you click on the 'Create new security' icon on the tool bar (looks like a white barrel). At first this had me stumped for ages since I wasn't familiar with the term 'security' being used in this manner (I'm a noob to this game). When you set it up just keep selecting Yahoo Finance and copy the company code into the code field. For Level II thing I just selected Arcapelligo since I have no idea what it is. But it looks pretty good. Is it just my imagination or does Level II give you access to live data?

Well what I do know about the system is that it downloads all the history data for a company from Yahoo finance and then graphs it for you. It also allows you to setup trading systems to automate your trading experience somewhat. All this for free. Can someone explain to me what Level II is, because I've had a play and it seems to bring up 'latest data', if it's doing what I think it's doing then that's pretty cool.

Anyhow, if you're like me you may have gotten stuck and nothings happening after you set up the security (select Window | Show View and select Securities if you can't see the list). Now what you do is right click on the security and select graph. It will prompt you to download the history (go for it). Now it makes a perty little graph that looks like it's about a day old to me. Now right click it again and select Open Level II. This may or may not work. It worked twice for me earlier today, but now I'm trying it again in order to share it with you all but the data isn't populating. A weird thing also that happened earlier with this data was it was displaying the date 26th of august for the Level II data. I don't know if this is normal since I don't really know what Level II is yet. If I knew nothing about trading and also nothing about computers then I would have been screwed trying to make it work(the support network is not really there yet, it's only version 0.25). Luckily I'm computer savy enough to figure out how to make the pretty colours come up on the screen, so that's a start. Anyway, for a free tool it looks pretty promising, and besides I just saved myself 6K. Not bad for a days work. Considering I've also found a free support network here that can help me sort out the intricacies of the share market, I'll scratch you're back if you scratch mine people. Free software for all I say. When I figure this baby out, you'll be the first to know.


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## onemore (26 August 2006)

Moola 

Can you post some links to it?
Is it a free charting software program?

cheers ...onemore


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## rub92me (26 August 2006)

Moola, another free charting program is FChart (it also has a pro version that is quite cheap if you want some more functionality). Well supported (even the free version) and regularly updated. The creator is a pretty funny SF writer too... You can also download stockprices (including years of history) from www.ipo-australia.com.


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## moola (27 August 2006)

http://eclipsetrader.sourceforge.net/

Yeah it does charting, but the charts aren't very flexible yet (the scale shifts as you scroll wich I find a bit disorienting). I'm on the development mailing list and they are working on improving it the charts alot. The other feature that's cool, but I haven't played with yet, is you can get it to indicate when a good time to buy or sell is (depending on rules you setup). But I assume that's pretty standard with software like this?

I found a way to automate the import of every company in the All Ords into the securities list (I don't think it's intended or recommended that you do that, I was just testing how much it could handle). It refreshes the whole history from yahoo finance every day, which can be quite slow (you can disable the auto-update feature on a company by company basis or if you're tricky like me there is a configuration text file and you just have to do a search and replace to switch them all off). I think the updating certainly needs improvement for efficiency reasons (I don't know why it doesn't just get the current days data if it's already got the rest).


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