Trade Navigator Platinum V. 3.01
Genesis Financial Technologies
425 Windchime Place
Colorado Springs, CO 80919
hmartinez@genesisft.com
(800) 808-3882
Overall Rating: 3 discs
Level: Beginner
System Requirements: Windows XP; 512 Megs of RAM; 2GHZ Pentium 4 Processor (or compatible); A broadband internet connection; CD ROM/DVD.
Cost: $1,995 for the platinum level; $495 for the gold edition and $99 for the basic edition. All prices are exclusive of exchange and data fees and data fees are extra.
Genesis Trade Navigator is a feature rich product that is suitable for both beginning and experienced traders. It is a relatively slick combination of “offline” charting and real-time data. Most charting products are good at managing real-time data or managing “offline” historical data. Very few do both with relative ease.
One of the big drawbacks of some of the mainstream products such as eSignal or TradeStation is the “online” nature of the historical data. It’s hard to do your work on a plane or in the middle of a park unless you’re somehow able to connect to the Internet. Trade Navigator gives you its entire database on DVD, and you can store all historical data locally on the hard drive. Further, they provide all the data; you do not have to manage a third-party data feed as many other applications would have you do.
Trade Navigator is also one of the few charting products that is available for outright purchase. Most competing products are available only for monthly lease. However, there is still a monthly fee for updates to the data.
Installation: 3-1/2 discs
Overall, installation was easy. The product was delivered on a DVD with a standard installation program. During the installation process, you are offered the ability to keep the historical price database on the DVD (to save disk space) or to copy it to the computer’s hard drive. I highly recommend the latter option because you will be able to create historical charts much faster.
After installation you will need to work with the Genesis support people to complete your first data download. This is because there is a special process that you have to go through to properly activate the features. After that, daily data downloads were easy and relatively smooth. However, they are lengthy.
The Basics: 3 discs
Trade Navigator offers the standard line, bar and candlestick charts. The one chart type that stood out was Bollinger bars. This is not usually included in other charting products. Also included are the standard complement of drawing tools, such as fib lines, trendlines and shapes.
A good selection of pre-built industry standard indicators is also present. Every charting application has its own terminology and paradigm, Trade Navigator is no exception. It has a chart window that can be divided into multiple panes with one or more indicators applied to it, and you can create your own studies or use one of the many that ships with the product. Most charting applications consider indicators with multiple lines a single indicator — Trade Navigator does not. The upper Bollinger band for example is a different indicator from the lower Bollinger band. You must combine all the lines into a study to be able to apply all lines simultaneously to each window. I found this part of the product’s paradigm odd.
There are three types of quote boards available: box, grid and forex. The box style has fields such as the bid and ask running down the left hand side of the quote board cell. The grid style has the fields running along the top and looks more like a traditional quote board (spreadsheet style). The forex style is a split box with the bid and ask on either side and low/high information at the bottom of the box.
For many traders, alerts are critical, especially for stock traders monitoring hundreds of issues. Trade Navigator’s alerts are flexible. Alerts can be set for any symbol on any window. Once an alert is triggered you can get a pop up message, change the background color of the window, play a sound, send a market/stop/limit order to your broker or log the message to a file.
With order entry, the product supports integrated trading on the charts. Many drawing objects can trigger trades using the “Alerts” function. For example, you can send a market order when a trend line is crossed. I really like the idea behind this feature. There are many instances where it would be nice to trail a stop along a trendline, and this functionality makes that easy. You can also trade off an “order ticket,” a classic ladder and directly off the charts (clicking a price point on the chart to buy or sell).
There is a simulation feature for the order entry module. That module has OCO and conditional orders in addition to the basic market/limit/stop orders. I strongly recommend that you test out any functionality you intend to use before committing real dollars to a trade.
Trade Navigator’s Toolbox function is a screen consisting of eight tabs including criteria and strategies. With criteria you can create simple true/false conditions such as “one moving average is above/below the other” and strategies are combinations of trading rules used for back testing. The product also does a very good job of filtering and scanning, and you can create a scan using both fundamental and technical data.
Usability: 3 discs
The product is very easy to use if you like working with the mouse. Keyboard users and hyperactive traders will be frustrated because not all functions can be done with the keyboard, including some of the most basic ones.
The user interface makes liberal use of tool bars that are context sensitive, like toolbars that change available functionality based on the window being used. Toolbars can be customized or turned on and off. Most common functions and some uncommon ones are available with one or two clicks. Windows can be linked by symbol and time frame so that changing a single symbol in one window changes it in all other linked windows.
You can scroll through symbols from a symbol-browser window to quickly review a group of symbols. However, this is something that should be done in offline mode and not when the product is updating data in real-time. Otherwise, it will make a time-consuming call to the Genesis servers to get the latest historical data for each symbol
Basic fundamental data for stocks is available in an attractively formatted window. You can choose the fundamental data to display from a large list of options. When viewing a futures symbol you can see the COT values along with some proprietary values if you are subscribed to them, such as Larry Williams’ Sentiment and Market Sentiment.
One of the nice touches is a status message that tells you when real-time data is being delayed.
Of course, as with many products there are areas that could be improved. The main one is the lack of keyboard support for many functions. For example, if I need to change a chart symbol I must use a dialog box rather than simply type the symbol into the chart. This is time consuming and many other functions require too many keystrokes.
Screen real estate usage could be improved as well. Window title bars cannot be turned off — those take up valuable real estate. There is no support for multiple monitors. If you’d like to use them you have to stretch the desktop across the monitors instead of being able to lay out your windows individually on each monitor. That is awkward and messy. Plus, you can only open one workspace at a time.
Also, it can take a long time to start up the application, especially if you have a lot of symbols loaded into your workspace. End of day processing and data downloads can take a long time too. This wouldn’t be a problem except that every time you call up a symbol in real-time mode it connects to its server to bring the data up to date before starting to stream ticks. This is a cause for concern because the connection process is much slower than competing products. If you lose the connection and turn on real-time streaming on a page loaded with a lot of symbols, then it will take a long time to restore the data stream to all those symbols.
For serious programmers the TradeSense formula language will be limiting. But most users will be happy with the capabilities of the language. I found myself wishing for more control.
Despite its limitations, Trade Navigator is still much more usable than many others that I’ve looked at in the past. The help file is better than most and their training seems to be above average and you can attend free weekly Webinars that train you on the use of the various aspects of the product.
Summary
Trade Navigator’s functionality is broad. I kept running into new features almost constantly during this review. It presents a good value for most traders. The flat price of $2,000 for the most advanced version of the product is almost a steal given the features that are included; and the price for end-of-day and delayed data is reasonable. If you’re looking for a charting platform and you don’t mind the limitations I outlined, then this product should be on your short list.
Nigel Bahadur runs the Research and Development group for LBRGroup and is a member of the American Association of Professional Technical Analysts (AAPTA). He can be reached at nigel@lbrgroup.com or via www.lbrgroup.com.
