Charting Services on the Net

There are nearly a dozen services that provide charts that futures traders may want to look at. However, we recommend only four of these services. The first four services below are the state of the art in Web charting services.

Should you forget your paper or screen chart service? Maybe.

The big advantage of the Web services is their cost. They are either free or significantly less expensive than the paper or screen version. I think that the Commodity Trend Service product is very competitive with any of the print chart services and should be seriously considered as an alternative.

On the other hand, none of the charting services will really satisfy the demands of the screen based trader who either wants to watch every tick unfold or is used to being able to interact with the service by calling up different charts with different indicators.

Still, many of you will find these services of value, particularly if you are on a budget.

Charting Services Listed Below

 

Prophet Information Systems

(www.prophetdata.com)

Prophet sells a subscription based chart service on the web as well as provides some free charts.

The free charts are generated by Prophet and are quite handsome. All of the free charts are continuous charts. In other words, they are composed of daily charts linked together, similar to a nearest futures chart. They allow you to show the chart over whatever time horizon you select. For example, you could show the copper market over the last six months or six years.

One of the key advantages of this service is that they have a very extensive selection of items to graph. They have all the usual futures contracts but also an extensive collection of foreign futures and cash markets.

Prophet also sells two subscription only chart services. Web Charts costs $9.95 per month for US futures, $14.95 per month for worldwide futures, and $19.95 for unlimited access per month. These are simply charts.

The second service includes technical analysis tools as well as the charts. This costs $19.95 per month or $29.95 for unlimited access.

The reason that we don't recommend the subscription services is that the previous two services, combined with the free Prophet service, should cover your needs, particularly if you trade primarily US futures.

 

-The Rest of the Chart Services-

We do not generally recommend the rest of these services. Most of them were more expensive than the recommended services or were of limited interest. We will list them in alphabetical order.

 

INO

(http://www.quotewatch.com/)

(Webmaster's Note: I have been notified that this site has been changed and significantly improved upon since this review was written. Soon, Editor-in-Chief Courtney Smith will be updating these reviews. In the meantime - check out this site and make your own judgement.)

This site has some pretty logos and a lot of useless information. I was reminded of a ghost town. There is the infrastructure but nothing in it. For example, they still are showing links to April, 2 0 May, and June contracts that have expired. That wouldn't be so bad, but those are listed as the current contracts! In other words, it's hard to get a working daily chart.