A weekend of freebies.. there is a free opensource charting package called Aiotrade. It’s widely used and fantastic and best of all… free! Give it a try, use it to develop your strategies. You can set it up to use Yahoo as a datafeed (via HTTP) but it can refresh the data every few seconds thereby giving you a free realtime charting package… see the following link to see how to add the FTSE and DOW charts (you can of course adapt it to whatever you want).. click here

The software is open source meaning that it is always being developed.. current version as I write is 1.0.3a and is available here http://ovh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/humaitrader/aiotrade-bin-1.0.3a.zip

If you want to learn more about the software, it’s official page is here http://aiotrade.com/

Hey all,

Just thought I’d log back in and write some more stuff which just popped into my head!

There was an article that I read a few weeks back.. that was about Japanese housewives currency trading. Fascinating reading.. here’s the link http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article2187250.ece

I have a friend and she told me that her grandmother started to play the currency markets when she retired… now she is making more money than at the height of her career!

Isn’t it amazing the concept of trading? It’s practically like alchemy… money can be created from nothing. You’re not selling anything material.. you just need to sit in front of a computer and press a few buttons and you can have a potentially endless source of cash. I guess that’s the reason why trading is so appealing, it is the perfect business.. your only start up costs are a computer and internet connection and off you go. Too many people see the dollar signs and think it’s easy… certainly it the concept of logging onto a computer and pressing a few buttons to make some money is fantastic but truth is, trading is one of the hardest endeavours to master. 95% of people fail… the 5% of those who do make it, take from the 95% that lose! Successful traders are rare and are the modern day alchemists, it’s no wonder why they get paid so much… it’s more of an art than a skill.

 Oh, I updated the main picture on the front page so that it looks more capitalistic.. hope you like it!