Chapter 4. Putting Your Computer to Work: Your Key Business Tool
In This Chapter
Streamlining trading activities
Selecting charting software, fundamental information sources, and research tools
Choosing a trading platform
Evaluating computer and Internet resources
Back in the old days, you'd call your broker to enter an order and then wait for your broker to phone back and report the fill price. Active traders? They'd hang out in the broker's lobby, watching the ticker, boasting over winning trades, commiserating over losing trades, and shooting the breeze.
If you kept charts, you either made them yourself or had them delivered by postal carrier in book form. They arrived at the end of each week. If you couldn't afford that extravagance, you'd buy monthly summaries and update them yourself.
Every retail investor bought and sold stocks the same way. The pros had the advantage, but it was more or less a level playing field for the rest of us.
Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find a ticker-tape machine in any brokerage office. The Internet has changed everything. You can still buy chart books, but now they're delivered via the Internet, and so are stock prices, real-time intraday charts, and research reports. You can enter orders online, have your orders filled within seconds, and receive notification showing the order's price almost as quickly.
Online brokers provide a vast array of research and trading tools for their clients. Real-time streaming quotes, proprietary and third-party research, ...
Get Trading for Dummies® 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
