Ionic Software Sharescope 3.60 review

Sharescope is a powerful stock market application with extensive analysis and data-mining capabilities.

It provides a wealth of facilities designed to help the private investor make informed trading decisions, with the subscription-based data service providing full market data each trading day.

Technical analysis is a branch of statistics concerned with helping investors make trading decisions. While some dismiss it as nonsense, others claim to have grown rich from home technical trading systems. Whatever the truth, Sharescope's range of analytical tools is impressive. It provides 31 statistical indicators, 11 market indicators, tabular data and obscure line studies such as Fibonacci arcs and Gann angles. The help section provides short but clear descriptions of what each indicator and study does and how to interpret them.

Data mining is a powerful facility that allows you to select shares for further analysis based on multiple configurable criteria. For instance, you might search for shares reaching new highs or lows, or those showing the greatest change in price over a specified time. This can save countless hours of looking through the entire database of over 9,000 items.

Sharescope contains extensive portfolio management facilities too, enabling you to track your holdings. This facility also helps with obscure things such as share splits and consolidations, and will calculate your capital gains tax payments if you trade profitably. Company statistics such as previous results, directors' share dealings and projected earnings are all included in the daily data feed, which you can access at any time.

The program's training mode gives the budding stock market guru the ability to test his or her theories and analytical skills. In this mode, the program picks a share at random and enables you to set markers to reveal the share's price gradually over time. Using this technique, you can test your strategy to see if you've found a formula for accurately predicting price rises.

To get the most out of this package, and to justify the monthly cost of the data feed, you need to be a regular trader or someone learning technical analysis. The extensive tools are impressive, but a trip to www.amazon.co.uk for books on the subject is required to get to grips with the true capabilities of the system. Those with some knowledge of technical analysis, however, will find Sharescope instantly familiar.

For people merely curious about the stock market, there are web-based sources of share price data and basic analytical tools that you might consider using instead. For the serious private investor, though, the data mining features alone make Sharescope worth the money.