Traders and affluent investors are invoking the power of technology to maximise their returns in the stock market. Trading software providers have made a killing from the stupendous rise in stock prices in the past few months by launching newer strategy tool to simplify stock trading.

Going by dealer estimates, there could be more than a 100 software providers (including individual programme writers) who provide ‘easy solutions’ to technical and fundamental trend analysis. “The business has picked up over the past few months.

We’ve already sold a good number of our integrated trading software package to traders and investors ,” said Himanshu Patil, president , Proseon Technologies. Proseon sells ‘Investar’ , a software that enables investors to gauge technical and fundamental trends.

While traditional stock market technology providers like Metastock , Metatrader, Falcon, Recognia, Iris and Wealthlab have graduated to intelligent algorithmic trading models (that are used by big brokerages and institutional investors ), the analysis and trend prediction space has been taken over by smaller companies .

These softwares are programmed to churn out data that helps in making an investment call. Analysing pricevolume trend, spreadscan trend and strengthweakness trend form the basis of these software programmes.

“Using a trend software , one can easily work out the price at which a trade has to happen. Some of these softwares can be integrated to the exchange-approved trading software using interfacers,” said Vivek Bhargava, director, Forceites, which recently launched ‘Vantagetrade’ , a trend analysis software that gives buy/sell signal on the past behaviour of a stock.

According to brokers, the use of analytical tools in stock trading gathered steam after the regulator allowed direct market access to institutional investors. Top institutions began using programmed trading techniques (algorithm trading) to benefit from price differentials and other market irregularities. Smaller players (especially intra-day traders, jobbers, arbitrageurs and high networth investors) — who could not afford or did not have the volume for programme trading — felt the need of trend predictors to derive similar benefits.

While they could not match algorithm traders in terms of speed, good trend research modules help them take prior positions in volatile stocks.

Almost all of these research tools are provided to investors for a set timeframe. The basic models of these tools would cost an investors anywhere between Rs 1,000 and Rs 8,000 for one month. Rates of stock analysers and price predictors depend on the number of indicators tracked by the software (indicators ranging between 30 and 200), the number of technical scanners (bull/bear investment strategies numbering between 30 and 500) and ability to open live charts and screens.

Small traders and low-volume investors also use Excel-based programmes to draw basic trading (tech) data like stock oscillators, stochastic ratios and moving averages. The analytical module used in Excel-based software are taken from freely available (downloadable) programmes TA-Lib , Conclave (for derivatives ) and Datafetcher . These softwares are priced between Rs 1,000 and Rs 5,000.