Why We Decided to Try to Reimagine and Reinvent the Stock Chart

I’ve built a lot of startups in my day. My last successful business that I co-founded, SingleHop, focused on automating the deployment and management of cloud infrastructure. It was acquired last year. I’ve also co-founded and sold a website hosting company called midPhase, and founded marketing SaaS platform called Concurra. The one common thread across all my endeavors was automation.

If you would have asked me back then what I would be doing now, I would have never guessed that it would be building stock charting software. Sure, I’ve been a part-time trader, for fun and profit, for years, and I love the markets, but would have never considered getting into the charting software industry back then.

And yet, that’s exactly what I’ve spent the last two years doing at TrendSpider.

Sometimes people ask me why I got into this world. The answer is simple: the charting world has not seen any real innovation in years. And, as a trader, I was convinced there had to be a better way.

Humans suck at analyzing stock charts.

This was one of our first marketing slogans, and it was a little controversial. A lot of people took offense, but we when we said it then and now, we mean it. People really do face serious handicaps when they try to analyze a chart:

• They make lots of mistakes in technical analysis.
• They then make more mistakes when placing their orders.
• They let their emotions get the best of them sometimes.
• They blame external factors for poor performance while taking credit for wins.

In other words: Humans really suck at analyzing stock charts. Yes, even the experts make mistakes. We all do.

We’re just too inconsistent, easily distracted, inherently biased, and subjective not to.

Meanwhile…

Proprietary trading firms, bank trading desks, hedge funds, algorithmic traders, and the high frequency folks are crushing it with real edge every day because they’re using powerful computers to do the grunt work for them.

One prop trading firm I know here in Chicago has internal systems built by their team of 100 developers to identify setups in charts and alert their traders. They can monitor a thousand more symbols at once than you even know exist, and pick the right ones at the right times with a higher degree of accuracy than any individual could dream of. Meanwhile, you’re sitting at home staring at the same chart for 15 minutes trying to find the true pattern printed on it, while trying to pay attention to three other monitors full of other charts.

No wonder individual retail traders are getting crushed every day.

TrendSpider is designed to give regular technical traders some of that edge, back.

We like to say TrendSpider is a beautiful charting platform — with the brains to match. But really, it’s four systems combined into one:

• An amazing charting platform with all the bells and whistles you could dream of. No compromises – all your favorite indicators, layouts, custom color themes, etc. are there, ready to use, out of the box.
• A powerful, fully customizable automated technical analysis system that can crunch charts at high speed, your way, not our way. You configure TrendSpider how you want to draw a trendline, and it will draw them your way going forward. Same applies for Fibonacci levels, and all other aspects of our automated analysis capabilities.
• A simple, visual multi-timeframe analysis tool that works on trendlines, indicators, and Fibonacci levels — so you can see long-term trends when trading on shorter-term timeframes. This exposes trends that other traders (like you!) are likely to miss.
• Last, but not least, are TrendSpider’s game-changing dynamic price alerts and multi-factor price alerts. These patent-pending bad boys can monitor charts for simple or complex setups automatically, in the cloud, using high-speed market data feeds.
  
  The power of our alerts should not be understated. Monitor any trendline or indicator for a touch, bounce or a breach.
  
  Watch for RSI levels to become oversold, then, wait for a bullish candlestick to form on a different timeframe.
  
  The possibilities are truly endless.

See your charts in a new light – time your trades with precision, like a pro

By combining automated analysis with smart, dynamic alerts – you can find trades faster, and time your entry and exists in a smarter, more data-driven way.

Since your analysis will be performed exactly the same way every single time, you’ll know if your trading system is working for you, or not.

And since alerts will keep an eye on your setup for you and let you know when to pull them back up, you’ll never miss out on an opportunity again.

In other words, TrendSpider makes you a better, more disciplined, more consistent, better performing version of you, your way. 

Thanks for reading!