Daytrading and IRESS, page-2

You would be wise to Paper Trade until you get your head around things. Your trading software needs to allow you to do this, so you can test out your strategies and do a lot of test runs. Lots.... The conditional orders are very much part of the equation, and if you are getting charged for these, they will kill your trading. You can use your Nab acc in combination with other software, but it makes things a bit tricky to place your trade on one App having switched from trading software. So two screens is very handy, and I would almost say, a minimum for day trading.

Serious day traders look to get integrated Trading/Brokerage setups so that they are able to assign 'hot keys' which when pressed, will place the trade with a single click. Very handy if you are trying to nail a specific price target that is moving as things change during the day. Do your research as to the programs on the market and how you are set up. Be mindful that if you are daytrading, you need to give yourself every chance of having all the resources that you need at your fingertips. Half baked software is just going to cost you a lot of money in the long run so do your homework and if they have trial software, take the trial and have good play with it. The more trials that you try out, the more you will see that some software is on the money and some is not so flash. It all depends on what requirements that you have for your trading.

Some programs to consider:

Amibroker
Metastock
Insight Trader
ProTA (for a Mac)
Market Analyst
Spark by Iguana 2 (a Mac version available)

Integrated Trading Software (Trading Software + Brokerage)
Bourse Data
Interactive Brokers
CMC Markets

One more thing. Some programs now have 'API's- this allows you to plug in live data to the trading program which allows your broker side of things to appear within the program. Very cool, and very handy as you can work from the one platform.

DYOR and have fun with it.