Reviews
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"This is a great product that Macintosh owners should add to their arsenal." |
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"... there is no competing Macintosh software that offers as many bells and whistles." |
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"ProTA Gold doesn't appear to have any competition
on the Macintosh"
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| "BeeSoft programs easily compete against the top Windows applications." |
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"... state-of-the-art, object-oriented charting interface..." |
American Association of Individual Investors - AAII (March/April 2001)
ProTA & ProTA Gold
Performance 5
Usefulness 5
Documentation 5
Ease of Use 5
Value 5
Editor's Top Pick point total for ProTA Gold: 25 out of possible 25.
ProTA and ProTA Gold from BeeSoft are relative newcomers to the technical analysis landscape. However, they have more than proven their worthiness with a range of features at an extremely competitive price. The BeeSoft programs easily compete against the top Windows applications.
ProTA offers all of the popular chart types along with over 40 fully customizable technical indicators and line studies. ProTA's portfolio sheets provide you with up to 20 columns of information in a spreadsheet-like format that allow you to track trade-specific information such as purchase data, number of shares or contracts purchased, and commissions. The portfolio automatically calculates statistics including cost basis, profit/loss, and return on investment. You can track technical information such as moving average values and volume activity, as well as post trade entries and exits and track overall performance.
ProTA Gold offers additional features found in many high-end technical analysis packages. You have the flexibility of creating an unlimited number of your own custom indicators and can download custom indicators from the BeeSoft web site and install them into the program or post your own creations. ProTA Gold also provides the functionality of creating your own trading systems and backtesting. ProTA Gold will scan for securities that meet your criteria. You can specify one or several technical and performance-based values. Those securities that pass the screen are then placed in a portfolio sheet where you can view and rank the results.
www.aaii.com
There is newer review by the AAII that gives ProTA Gold the following ratings (out of 5): Charting & Indicators: 5, Trading Systems: 5, Screening: 3, Documentation: 4, Ease of Use: 5. I will post the review when I get a copy of it. Jeff.
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Futures Magazine
Rating system: excellent = 4, good = 3, adequate = 2, poor = 1
ProTA Gold
Overall rating: 4 (out of 4)
Complexity level:
Beginner to advanced. Beginners will have no problem charting data and indicators. The backtesting scripting language and database scanning require a little more expertise.
Reviewed by George Pruitt
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Macintosh owners no longer have to run out and buy an IBM-compatible PC to analyze the markets technically. The current rebirth of the Macintosh (iMac, iBook, G3's and G4's) has given rise to a slight increase in the production of technical analysis software. In addition, thanks to the Internet, there also has been an increase in platform independent Web sites that offer technical analysis. Almost every online brokerage company has some type of charting package. Unfortunately, most of these Internet-based and standalone applications fall short when it comes to in-depth analysis.
BeeSoft has come to the rescue of Mac users who not only want to chart markets and maintain an historical database, but also want to test their own trading ideas. This feature has been around for numerous years on the PC platform with programs such as TradeStation and SuperCharts. There have been other programs for the Mac that offered similar features, but not in such a streamlined, functional and complete package as ProTA Gold.
Installation: 4 (out of 4)
Support and documentation: 4 (out of 4)
Unlike most new software programs, ProTA Gold ships with a large, easy-to-read manual. The manual is complete and includes a tutorial, glossary of popular indicators and their applications, a complete listing of all functions in the scripting language and an index.
Calls were made on four different occasions and the owner of BeeSoft answered questions twice over the phone. Messages that were left on the other two calls were answered via e-mail within a few hours. Not one question went unanswered by either the online help or technical support.
Database management: 3.5 (out of 4)
The universal text importer feature of the program is simple and straightforward. If your data are in Ascii format, ProTA Gold will have no problem importing them. ProTA Gold is compatible with Dial Data, BeeSoft, America Online, CompuServe, Quicken, Quote.com, Telescan, Prophet Data and MetaStock Ascii format. If your data are not in one of these Ascii-based formats, you will have to convert them and run the universal text importer.
The only drawback encountered with the text importer was that we were unable to import intraday data; there was no field for time. ProTA Gold cannot read many of the industry standard PC formats, such as CSI, Techtools, Bridge, Genesis and HistoryBank.com. But that should not pose a problem, due to the ability of converting proprietary formats into Ascii. The program also can download BeeSoft data directly from the Internet.
Features: 4 (out of 4)
ProTA Gold has beautiful charts, numerous customizable indicators and a highly efficient database management program. These simple features are comparable to ones found in programs costing much more. In addition to the standard data and indicator plotting, ProTA Gold can backtest a trading system - a feature that has escaped Macintosh-based software for years. The software's comprehensive scripting language allows you to program virtually any trading idea.
The programming environment is visually oriented. A string of different dialog boxes guides you through your entry and exit techniques, money management strategy and market selection. Users can set up a batch process and run a single test over several different markets or optimize a system over different parameters.
In addition to backtesting, you also can scan a large portfolio of different markets or stocks for certain criteria. To demonstrate the backtesting capabilities, we programmed a simple Donchian breakout system that buys the highest high of the past 20 days and sells the lowest low of the past 20 days. Programming the system was easy with the visual design interface, and the system was programmed with a few keystrokes.
ProTA Gold generates analysis reports that include statistics such as maximum drawdown, net and gross profit or loss, risk/ reward ratio, buy and hold comparisons and average daily profit. Individual trades and their results are plotted on the actual price charts of the market tested.
ProTA Gold received four disks because of the overall experience encountered with the software, the manual and the company along with the fact that there is no competing Macintosh software that offers as many bells and whistles. Not once did the program hang up.
This is a great product that Macintosh owners should add to their arsenal. If you are an investor or trader and have been holding off on buying a Macintosh due to the limited amount of technical analysis software, wait no longer.
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Do you trade stocks or commodities? Do you use some form of technical analysis to make trade decisions? Are you a Mac person? Well guess what? There is a software package which is shockingly powerful, amazingly easy to use, and only available for the Macintosh!
ProTA Gold, by BeeSoft, is a market charting and technical analysis software package developed exclusively for the Macintosh.
ProTA Gold supports multiple chart viewing, customizable portfolio tracking, a list of standard indicators including Bollinger Bands, moving averages, Parabolic SAR, Zig Zag, and linear regression forecasting as well as others. ProTA Gold offers the following standard priceoscillation indicators: Bull/Bear Power, TRIX, Stochastics,William's Accumulation/Distribution, and others. Volatility studies include: average true range, standard deviations,Chaikins Volatility Study and others. Volume studies include: Market Facilitation Index,Money Flow Index, Negative Volume Index, plus many many more. If what you want is not in there, you can "roll your own" using ProTA Gold's robust formula-building language and any of the 140 built-in functions and operands. ProTA Gold supports the direct import of data from the following: America Online, BeeSoft, CompuServe, Dow Jones, Dial Data, the MetaStock format, Prophet, Quicken, Quote.Com, Telescan's WallStreetCity, Zacks (Bozeman NetProfit), Excel, and ClarisWorks spreadsheets, as well as any comma- or tab-delimited ASCII files.
Don't tell anybody, but you can find "end of day" data all over the web. If you are even a little motivated, you could write a text filter using FutureBasic, C, Hypercard, or maybe even AppleScript to generate your own comma-delimited ASCII file for data importing.
I have a 250 MHz 603e running MacOS 8.5.1 and ProTA Gold is snappy. I'm told it will run on any color-capable Mac. In fact, I began using ProTA 2.0 on a Quadra 630 (68040 with 20M RAM Mac OS 8.0). ProTA 2.0 crashed if I attempted to perform 2 consecutive ASCII imports (a little annoying, but usable) but since I've upgraded to the Gold version, I have yet to experience a crash. The added features in the Gold version are well worth the price (IMHO).
Someday, I'll be a bazillionare, and I will owe it, in some measure, to ProTA Gold. If you are interested in any type of investing or technical analysis of stocks, bonds, futures, market indexes, mutual funds or market data, you need this software!
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BeeSoft develops and publishes Mac-first, Mac-only stock market software. With over 2000 registered customers in over 30 countries and thousands more using their free demo version, BeeSoft seems to have the most popular programs for the platform. For complete info -- including a feature table, walkthrough, demo version, GIF images, secure ordering, tech support, and additional links for the Mac OS-based investor -- go to http://beesoft.net/.
Beesoft's ProTA and ProTA Gold include Internet data downloading, charting, technical analysis, trade tracking and portfolio analysis, and securities ranking. ProTA Gold adds the ability to write and optimize your own trading strategies, custom analytics, and database scanning criteria using a built-in formula building language.
The centerpiece of both programs is the state-of-the-art, object-oriented charting interface which includes over 50 user-configurable analytics, slide shows, templates, and\ click/double-click/drag-and-drop interaction. Compatible with all markets, all securities and all color-capable Macs.
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ProTA is a charting and technical analysis program for the Macintosh. It is easy-to-use and intuitive, and I was able to construct complex and revealing displays of ticker prices and analyses within just a few minutes. It is capable of tracking and analyzing stocks, options, mutual funds, bonds, indexes, futures and commodities. This program will appeal to people who trade or actively track their investment portfolio, or participate in an investment club.
ProTA is a pleasure to use. Without referring to the manual, I just clicked a few icons on the screen that seemed to relate to producing a chart (pop-up icon descriptions are very helpful), and I was able to produce a chart. Applying technical overlays or companion panes was straightforward, and I was able to produce a customized technical
analysis within the first few minutes of use. I then flipped through the excellent manual and on-line help, and with a bit of switching back and forth to try out features on a test chart, was completely familiar with the program within two hours. Of course, understanding the proper use of technical indicators takes long and serious study.
It has solid portfolio tracking and analysis capabilities. You can set up a slide show to display a succession of stocks, and the portfolio display can include ranking analysis that shows at a glance how your holdings are performing. It can display bar, close, candlestick, and point and figure charts; I won't detail its line studies and technical indicators, since all of that is covered on their web site. It is simple to set up a portfolio and track it, yet
every detail of the layout can be customized to provide exactly what you want to see at a glance. Charts are similar; simply double-click on a ticker and you can instantly see the chart, yet almost every aspect of the chart, including overlays and panes, can be customized. Portfolio layouts and chart displays can be saved as templates, so that you can quickly apply them to different tickers or sets of tickers. In addition, you can save a group of open windows as a 'suite', which allows you to easily resume previous work or establish working sets for daily review.
ProTA is an end-of-day trading system, so it doesn't handle intra-day trades, bars or ticks. One limitation is that it doesn't print charts in color. This is annoying when you have very complex overlays, but\ its black-and-white output is professional-looking. ProTA has limited display annotation capabilities, including arrows and text.
ProTA Gold, which includes all of the features of ProTA, adds the ability to design custom indicators, design and backtest trading systems, and scan the database of tickers for testing and picking potential trades. It uses a custom "Gold language" to specify the indicator or trading system. This language is quite simple to use, and is best suited for making combinations of the existing library of indicators; a researcher would probably find it hard to design a
complex indicator from scratch. ProTA Gold cannot access external libraries of routines written in regular programming languages, such as C, so it cannot easily be extended to add custom features or access other databases. However, these drawbacks are unlikely to limit anybody but the professional technician or trader. I haven't yet tried designing a trading system within ProTA Gold, but the examples make it look quite easy.
A full-featured demo, which only tracks a limited set of stocks, is available for download on BeeSoft's web site at <http://www.beesoft.net/>. I found two other low-priced Macintosh charting and analysis programs: Tradex ($60 shareware) from iLANGA <http://www.serv.net/ilanga/> and Analyst Lite ($160) from Trendsetter Software <http://www.trendsoft.com/>. I spent five minutes with Tradex, and threw it away in frustration; it was horribly non-intuitive. Analyst Lite appears to be a basic charting and analysis program, and its computer-generated trendlines and advice are a plus. However, it has significantly fewer charting and analysis capabilities than ProTA, which compares more closely with Trendsetter's Personal Analyst ($350). Trendsetter has other programs in the $400-700 range, including day-trading packages, but it doesn't appear that any offer the customizable indicator and trading system design and backtesting capabilities of ProTA Gold.
Full credit for the price of ProTA is given towards an upgrade to ProTA Gold, so you're not wasting money if you start out with ProTA. ProTA Gold doesn't appear to have any competition on the Macintosh, and can be compared with similar PC programs, such as SuperCharts ($400) from Omega Research <http://www.omegaresearch.com/>.
Doug Frick
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MacFan
ProTA 2.11
4.5 out of a possible 5
(Review text not available)
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Stocks & Commodities Magazine
ProTA 2.11
By John Sweeney
At one time, many small shops offered technical analysis packages. Unfortunately, many fell by the wayside or settled into small niches serving custom clientele. A few - Omega Research, Windows on Wall Street, and Equis - realized the importance of marketing and grew to become giants in the niche, generally daunting new entrants into the field. Their courageous example did not go unnoticed however, and inspired some to do the same, and now new technical analysis software is beginning to appear. One such is ProTA, a program with the added fillip of being designed to take advantage of the Apple Macintosh operating system’s fluidity and ease of use as well as the latest crop of fast Mac central processing units (CPUs).
ProTA gives you full-color charting (Figure 1) with full Mac color selection capabilities and a convenient "turning" toolbar that gives you quick access to all available buttons. That’s helpful because ProTA has many, many buttons. Developer Jeffery Bizon is startlingly frank about his intention to provide all of the features found in DOS programs in his Apple OS program.
INNOVATION
Bizon’s not there yet, but he’s on his way and has already provided some novel features. First off, you don’t buy a separate downloader because ProTA detects and handles all of the data formats listed above. ProTA also has import and export capabilities, which are semi-automatic given the program’s ability to examine datafiles on its own.
ProTA is also versatile. It handles stocks, mutual funds, indices, futures, options, bonds and market statistics. A former trader, apparently Bizon wanted something that could go wherever he wanted to go.
Then there are the dropdown menus; if they can be expressed graphically with pictures, they are. New to me, this display I found very useful because, for example, you could see immediately how your charts were going to be arranged on the screen. Another nice plus is a pointable cursor that extends through same-dates on all charts, whether you’ve arranged them horizontally or vertically; no more guessing if two things happened on the same date. Price values as well as indicator values popup on the charts as you drag the cursor.
Nor is the workday neglected. Chart types include closes, bars, point and figure (Figure 2) and candlesticks all are available in linear or semilog scaling. ProTA has most of the features usually provided these days: drawing; textual annotations and positioning, zooming (two processes); 50 adjustable indicators (Figure 3), screen layout saving and retrieval (as in chart suites or workspaces); analytical templates; daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly compression; automatic alignment of time for all charts on the screen; and ticker scrolling (or slide show). All this comes with as many colors and shadings as your RAM and video RAM will support, granting you unmatched image control.
PORTFOLIOS
ProTA even includes a nifty portfolio management function call portfolio sheets. It comes in the format of a spreadsheet with up to 20 columns of information that you select, some of which can be technical information such as averages relationships, candlestick patterns and volume activity. You can enter trade entries and exits and use the portfolio sheet to compute performance. Sorting up to five columns also facilitates portfolio analysis.
Even the look of the portfolio can be set and recalled. The columns, sort keys, and row and column layouts can be captured just as you would a chart layout. Thus, once you have everything arranged as you like them for a certain portfolio, you can save that setup and, if you like, apply it to another portfolio rather than start fresh. Or you can haul out one of the canned views that come with the program (Figure 4).
ProTA’s portfolio management function isn’t computationally powerful (there’s no column math) but it is flexible and, with 20 columns of data, capacious. Some diligent setup work should give just about anyone a view that will match up well with their brokerage’s statement, basic screening and generate gain/loss information. The ability to transfer closed transactions to a separate view provides the basis for convenient tax-lot accounting.
SUPPORT
At this stage, you have the luxury of support by the developer with a fast response, something that can’t last but is enjoyable. You won’t call much because the program doesn’t crash, the interface is fairly intuitive, and the manual is very well done. In the manual, I easily found everything I sought and I didn’t find a single reference to a screen object that wasn’t shown right there by the text. Plus, the manual has a functional index which is always appreciated.
Stocks & Commodities Magazine web site: http://traders.com
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