Where to Find Free Stock Charting Software

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A nice feature about being a trader is that you can run a low cost operation. Your biggest costs upfront is your trading capital and a laptop/desktop (see: A simple day trading computer set-up). Once you get up and running, your biggest expenses will be your commissions and taxes. You will have to pay taxes no matter what. But if you go with the right broker, your commissions should be pretty low when compared to the kind of money you can make in this business.

The other expense I can think of is a chatroom and stock charting software. Our trade room will cost you about $3/day. Considering you can make the monthly subscription back with one trade, its peanuts.

Where to Find Free Stock Charting Software

The other essential thing we need is stock charting software. I used to pay about $20/mo for this, but I soon figured out how to get free stock charting software.

Where to Find Free Stock Charting Software?

I actually learned about this when I joined the Lincoln List trade room. I asked several members what charting software they were using and everyone seemed to be using the same thing, Think or Swim, which was bought out by TD Ameritrade.

Think or Swim might not be a standalone broker anymore but it’s platform rocks. How do you get the charting software for free? There are a couple of ways. First, open a TD Ameritrade account and deposit some money. It doesn’t have to be much. $100 will do. That should be enough to allow you to download the Think or Swim platform. The other option, and this is how I did it, is to open a TD Ameritrade account and sign up as a simulator user. This method also allowed me to download the Think or Swim platform.

Once downloaded, you could play around with it and customize it any way you like it. I personally like to have two charts side by side (5 minute and Daily). Other members have the charts stacked on top of each other or have 4 or more charts on one screen. And that’s the beauty of Think or Swim, it is free and highly customizeable. Plus its real time and comes with level 2, live news and several other features that other charting software and trading platforms charge a high monthly fee for.

Finally, we share this information for several reasons. First, we don’t make no money from affiliates or anything of that sort. Think or Swim is completely free!!! Second, we are here to help. We see so called Gurus promoting expensive software and we feel they are a doing a disservice to someone just starting out in trading.