• Software is an integral component of the investing process for many of today's stock-market participants. The wide variety of investing-software programs available lets you choose the features that suit your investment style best, and many automatically scan the stock market for trading ideas. Whether you focus on stock-chart analysis, stock-option strategies or other methods, the right software can help facilitate the process of finding good investment opportunities.
  
  

TradeStation

• TradeStation is a stock-market program that offers features once available only to professional traders. In particular, it lets you create automated trading strategies, which then let the software discover and initiate trades without your intervention. Not only does this type of program allow to you focus on other tasks, but it also removes the emotional effects of directly interacting with your trades. For many, the stress of investing is a significant handicap, and automated trading lets you leave the decisions to the software.
  
  

MultiCharts

• When investors develop their stock-market strategies, an important part of their process involves "backtesting," or applying a particular investment method to historical prices to see how the method would have fared in the past. Backtesting can be a complicated affair, and MultiCharts is a program that streamlines the process. This stock-market investment program lets you create a trading strategy and then test it against a database of past price action. It gives you a summary of all profitable trades versus losing trades and evaluates your hypothetical return on investment capital over time.
  
  

EdgeRater

• EdgeRater is another program that primarily facilitates backtesting. This program syncs with an online stock database, so it can test any strategy against years of price data on nearly any stock. The software is designed with novices in mind, in contrast with other backtesting software that assumes a background in programming and investing methods.
  
  

thinkorswim

• The "thinkDesktop" application is an all-in-one solution for trading and charting. The program helps stock traders by offering "paperMoney," a virtual trading account with which you can buy and sell shares using fake capital. This is a useful feature for the trader who wishes to test out ideas without risking real money. The program also includes "StockHacker," an algorithm for detecting trading opportunities among thousands of stocks, based on the criteria you select. The program requires a brokerage account with thinkorswim.