The Myth Of Metastock
A Quick Guide for People Considering Metastock
and think it may be too hard....
Many people say that Metastock is a hard program to use. I personally think nothing could be further from
the truth. I have found it as easy, if not a lot easier to use than many other charting programs.
For starters it is completely windows based and driving it is the same as driving any other windows
program. The menu's appear the same, the functions are the same and everything is quick and easy to
use.
Like any program it takes a day or two of playing around to know exactly where everything is and
how to use the many shortcuts that are available. The beauty of it is you do not need to know everything in order
to get started and it is easy to start using all the tools and more that are available on other programs.
The best part is once you have the basics mastered the program has almost endless searching and indicator
capabilities.YOu do not need to know this to get started however.
The following diagrams are designed to show the simple steps in opening a chart, drawing a trendline
and placing an indicator on the chart.
Firstly open Metastock by clicking on the logo on your computer - just like any other program. The following
blank metastock screen appears. You will notice I have marked some of the areas of the program
with arrows. Notice how these are similar to Microsoft Word or Excel.
The next step is to open a chart which is dead easy. Simply click on the "File Menu" in the
top right corner (as you do for any other Microsoft program) and select open.
Selecting open brings up the following screen, from which point we can find a chart to open:
Lets say we want to look at the chart for KBO or Kimberley Oil. We select Local Data (this is the data that is
saved on your computer.) From here we simply select the "K" folder which will bring up all the stocks whose
symbols start with K:
We simply choose KBO or Kimberley Oil from the list and click open. The chart is opened as in the following
diagram, note the price action and voume is displayed.
Using Indicators and Trendlines
The next thing we might like to do is to place a trendline on the chart. This is quick and easy. Simply
choose the trendline tool on the left:
Now simply draw the trendline in as you would with any other
microsoft program when using lines, therfore click down the mouse where you wnat it to
start and drag the line to the desired position.
Now we have opened the stock and drawn a trendline and the knowledge of previous windows
programs would get most people this far at least. Just because it has
a lot of advanced capabilities, these do not need to be understood to use the basics of the program.
Lets look how easy it is to plot a 30 period exponential moving average.
Click on the indicator list at the top as shown in the following screen shot:
This will bring down a drop down list from which we can select the indicator we wish to use. We find
the moving average as shown below and then simply click and drag the indicator on to the chart:
The following screen comes up as we need to tell the computer what type of moving average we want.
We enter the number of periods (in this case 30), the type of moving average (in this case
exponential) and the price the average is calculated on (in this case the Closing price).
Once we have done this we simply click OK and the indicator is automatically placed on the chart
as shown:
How easy was that? We opened a chart and placed the two most popular trading tools on the chart
and any body with the knowledge of how to turn on a computer could deal with it.
I hope this has demonstrated how easy metastock can be to use. Even though you might drive a ferrari
doesn't mean you have to have your foot flat to the floor all the time!
EDUCATION IS YOUR BEST WEAPON
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