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.

Hi Kneighbour,

Wow what a post, please let me comment.

I am an Ex Network administrator, MCSE qualified twice over, going for my third run now, and I might even add on MCDBA over the next year or so. I just maintain these skills as fall back should my trading career fall short temporarily, or I want to raise more capital while trading futures at night.

I've been a fulltime trader for a few years and use this product as the basis for my work.

Everytime an update comes out, I uninstall the previous version and install the new version. In earlier versions, my customisations would be lost without first exporting them and importing them, however this is no issue now. I must say, this process, including the export/import of customisations would take no more than ten minutes.

4hr installation time? I think your experience is certainly not consistent with what the majority of users experience.

Do you need to be an MCSE twice over to uninstall and reinstall in ten minutes flat? I certainly don't think so. For most it is just a next next next wizard. The installation routine even initiates installations of sql 2000 runtime and the .Net Framework if they are not already installed.

BullCharts is state of the Art. It uses SQL 2000 and the .NET Framework and really, Windows XP is the perfect platform for these underlying technologies and therefore Bullcharts. Why would you install a state of the art product on an archaic operating system such as Windows 98? Except for the fact you have an older system that is only capable of running Windows 98. I'm not even sure Microsoft support Windows 98 anymore, so why should Weblink?

Weblink being a commercial enterprise, they, imho, should stick with what the majority of users use and/or where the technology is heading.

Serious traders, have serious hardware, and seriously smooth machines - Windows 98 is not the platform for that, not in a million years. Uninterupted Power Supply, redundant harddrive, thats the stuff, just for starters. I even have a spare 17inch monitor should one of these four blow. Its all a tax deduction 

The guys at weblink do not trade at all from what I know, but the key is, they do Listen to their trading customers - I agree with you this is rare. Most certainly they will implement good ideas, perhaps not within a few hours (unless its a serious bug) but they will consider ideas. Agreed that Equis wouldn't give you the same respect.

Position sizing is such an individual thing, excel is a much better tool for this. Excel is designed for manipulating numbers. If you go ahead with your purchase, I'd be happy to give you a copy of mine (and then discuss if you think it can be done better). But as a programmer yourself, perhaps I should ask you to program one for me ;-) Seriously, I've been looking to make some position sizing tools, but I've only got admin/infrastructure skills not programming skills. Hmmm...maybe you're right, maybe a basic pos size tools built into bc would be useful, but gee, there are more important things for them to work on imho. Excel.

"I already have a paid up data service and expensive software. Why should I double up with yet another service and package?" - Take your loss and find another more suitable position, that dataservice and product are obviously not doing what you want, otherwise you would not be trialing BC. I'm sure that data integration with other vendors will increase over time.

So far as reliability of the platform, this product is 2nd to none. More reliable than the CFD dealing platform I use even (been using it for a year or two now also). Over adsl it hardly ever miss's a beat, and over dial-up its pretty good too (just don't have too many charts or so open).

Next time you reinstall the product message me via private message and I'll gladly assist you. This is the least I can do for all the help weblink have given me over the last couple of years.

Wish I didn't pay $2000 and $99 per month for Market Master, certainly an inferior product. But, in the end, its all learning. Took my loss, took this position with bullcharts, never looked back.

Hope you do the same,

Simon S.

P.S. I might be completely wrong, but I think BC does install on Windows 98, might want to contact the support team to clarify.

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.

I have to say - in all fairness to IC-Investor - that on this point I was wrong. It WAS written by an active trader. It just goes to show how different people can do things differently. And do not get me wrong - IC-Investor is not a poor program - it is right up there with Metastock and Bullcharts. I think it is better than Metastock in many ways. But it is not as good as Bullcharts - again, only in my opinion.

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.