Freecharts SE is a stockmarket charting program. It will take end-of-day data and import it either file-by-file or whole directories at a time. The only limits to the amount of data you can use with the program are physical ones - the speed of your computer, the amount of hard drive space you have, and how long you are willing to wait for a chart to appear. The more data you shovel in, the slower things will run. Of course, you can install multiple instances of the program and use each instance for a different market - e.g. commodities, DJ, Nasdaq and so on.


I must point out that this program does not provide buy or sell recommendations.  It just displays indicators on a chart wherever your conditions are met.  Remember that a charting program will only provide information - and information is useless without knowledge.


I have a Celeron 633 (overclocked to 950mhz) with 128mb of RAM. I have just over 12 months of data for every company on the ASX - the Australian Stock Exchange. My file shows 4000+ companies, but I do have records for all commodities, other indexes, etc. My database file is 32mb, and from the time I enter a code to the time the program has finished drawing all five charts I have to wait about 1/2 a second. On a Celeron 366 with 96mb of RAM that blows out to 2 seconds.


I must point out that this program does not provide buy or sell recommendations.  It just displays indicators on a chart wherever your conditions are met.  Remember that a charting program will only provide information - and information is useless without knowledge.

 

Installation

Freecharts SE is written in Visual Basic 6, and therefore requires the Visual Basic runtimes from Microsoft.  I strongly suggest that you go to www.spacejock.com and follow the instructions on the runtimes page -  it lists in great detail which files are required.  Of course, if you're feeling adventurous or know you already have all the runtimes (for example, if you have Visual Basic 6 on your computer and it's patched to service pack 5) just install and run the program.


Anyway, to install the program itself:

Unpack the ZIP file to a temporary folder 
Run Setup.exe from the temporary folder 
Choose your destination directory and proceed.
Once the installation has finished, youll have a new entry in your start menu. Look under Programs and youll see a folder called FreeCharts. Inside this folder is the shortcut to the main program, and you should click it to run FreeCharts.