What publicly available software do professional stock traders use for stock analysis?
Factset also provides a host of tools for analysis. Not many people know as they aren't as prevalent as Bloomberg. CapitalQ and Thomson Reuters also provide analysis tools. Most of the market data providers also provide analysis tools to analyze the data they and others provide. Bloomberg Professional seems to be very popular. It provides any kind of data you can imagine. Analysis is a subjective interpretation of the data. Another one I have seen mentioned used is Equity Feed. It had varies levels of the software depending on the markets you want and can provide level 2 quotes if select that option. http://stockcharts.com/ is also a great tool I see mentioned with lots of free stuff. Bloomberg is very popular, especially for researching individual companies. Market QA and Factset are popular for analyzing data. Microsoft Excel and Matlab are very common for analyzing the data.  Lots of time traders will take data from Bloomberg, Market QA, Factset or where ever, and then actually preform their analytics in Excel or Matlab. A lot of the brokers provide their own software to traders using their platform, and that software can also contain different tools to help the traders as well. If you are looking to analyze stocks and don't need the other features provided by Bloomberg and Reuters (e.g. derivatives and FX), you could also look at WorldCap, which is a mobile solution to analyze global stocks, at FactSet and S&P CapitalIQ.  Please note that I am affiliated with WorldCap.
You need a source of delisted historical data. Such data is typically only available from paid sources. According to my records, Lawson Software Inc listed on the NASDAQ on 7 Dec 2001 and delisted on 6 Jul 2011.  Its final traded price was $11.23.  It was taken over by Infor who bid $11.25 per share. Source: Symbol LWSN-201107 within Premium Data US delisted stocks historical data set available from http://www.premiumdata.net/products/premiumdata/ushistorical.php Disclosure: I am a co-owner of Norgate / Premium Data. The important followup is what KIND of financial analyst do you want to be? Unless you're doing VaR or advanced quant trading/risk analysis, Excel and VBA will be much more useful for making you excel at the day to day. Yes, http://shares.telegraph.co.uk/stockscreener/ has what you're looking for. Frankly, the article is mostly right, but I disagree with his specific recommendation.  Why use one of these software services at all?  Put your money into a retirement (or other) account and invest it in index funds.  Beating index funds over the long run is pretty difficult, and if anyone's going to do it, it won't be someone that treats it like a hobby, regardless of whether you pick stocks yourself or let some software do it for you.  I personally think the big value-add from investment advisers only comes in the form of tax and regulation advice.  Knowing what kind of tax-exempt accounts exist and what the rules for them are is useful, and often non-trivial to fully grasp and plan for.  Also, the investment advisers I've talked to seemed to be pretty knowledgeable about that sort of thing, whereas their understanding of investment concepts like risk/reward tradeoffs, statistics, and portfolio optimization is generally weak. "I have to seriously disagree with this. Automated news analysis may have not worked for you for a variety of reasons (most likely all related to infrastructure/software inexperience), but it works and some shops and funds have made fortunes just doing news based automated trading.  I have personal experience working in a Chicago shop which went through a few off the shelf solutions, like [Ravenpack](http://ravenpack.com/services/rpna_dj.htm) before rolling a custom news analytics platform which integrated with quantitative strategies to move a lot of volume.  The whole premise of your post just seems very off to me. ""The problem that arises is that it is nearly impossible to make money off of automating trades."" -- an entire segment of the industry would like to have a word with you." "A company whose stock is available for sale to the public is called a publicly-held or publicly-traded company.  A public company's stock is sold on a stock exchange, and anyone with money can buy shares through a stock broker. This contrasts with a privately-held company, in which the shares are not traded on a stock exchange. In order to invest in a private company, you would need to talk directly to the current owners of the company. Finding out if a company is public or private is fairly easy.  One way to check this is to look at the Wikipedia page for the company.  For example, if you take a look at the Apple page, on the right sidebar you'll see ""Type: Public"", followed by the stock exchange ticker symbol ""AAPL"".  Compare this to the page for Mars, Inc.; on that page, you'll see ""Type: Private"", and no stock ticker symbol listed. Another way to tell: If you can find a quote for a share price on a financial site (such as Google Finance or Yahoo Finance), you can buy the stock.  You won't find a stock price for Mars, Inc. anywhere, because the stock is not publicly traded." Interactive Brokers provides historical intraday data including Bid, Ask, Last Trade and Volume for the majority of stocks. You can chart the data, download it to Excel or use it in your own application through their API.  EDIT: Compared to other solutions (like FreeStockCharts.com for instance), Interactive Brokers provides not only historic intraday LAST**** trades **but also historic BID and ASK data, which is very useful information if you want to design your own trading system.  I have enclosed a screenshot to the chart parameter window and a link to the API description. "Yes, Interactive Brokers is a good source for live data feeds and they have an API which is used to programmatically access the feeds, you will have to pay for data feeds from the individual data sources though.  The stock exchanges have a very high price for their data and this has stifled innovation in the financial sector for several decades in the united states. But at the same time, it has inflated the value and mystique of ""quants"" doing simple algorithms ""that execute within milliseconds"" for banks and funds.  Also RIZM has live feeds, it is a younger service than other exchanges but helps people tap into any online broker's feeds and let you trade your custom algorithms that way, that is their goal." I was going to comment above, but I must have 50 reputation to comment. This is a question that vexes me, and I've given it some thought in the past. Morningstar is a good choice for simple, well-organized financial histories.   It has more info available for free than some may realize.  Enter the ticker symbol, and then click either the Financials or the Key Ratios tab, and you will get 5-10 years of some key financial stats.  (A premium subscription is $185 per year, which is not too outrageous.) The American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) provides some good histories, and a screener, for a $29 annual fee. Zacks allows you to chart a metric like EPS going back a long ways, and so you can then click the chart in order to get the specific number.  That is certainly easier than sorting through financial reports from the SEC.  (A message just popped up to say that I'm not allowed to provide more than 2 links, so my contribution to this topic will end here.  You can do a search to find the Zacks website.  I love StackExchange and usually consult it for coding advice.  It just happens to be an odd coincidence that this is my first answer.  I might even have added that aside in a comment, but again, I can't comment as of yet.) It's problem, however, that the universe of free financial information is a graveyard of good resources that no longer exist.  It seems that eventually everyone who provides this information wants to cash in on it.  littleadv, above, says that someone should be paid to organize all this information. However, think that some basic financial information, organized like normal data (and, hey, this is not rocket science, but Excel 101) should be readily available for free.  Maybe this is a project that needs to happen.  With a mission statement of not selling people out later on. The closest thing out there may be Quandl (can't link; do a search), which provides a lot of charts for free, and provides a beautiful and flexible API.  But its core US fundamental data, provided by Sharadar, costs $150 per quarter.  So, not even a basic EPS chart is available there for free. With all of the power that corporations have over our society, I think they could be tabulating this information for us, rather than providing it to us in a data-dumb format that is the equivalent of printing a SQL database as a PDF!  A company that is worth hundreds of billions on the stock market, and it can't be bothered to provide us with a basic Excel chart that summarizes its own historical earnings?  Or, with all that the government does to try to help us understand all of these investments, they cannot simply tabulate some basic financial information for us? This stuff matters a great deal to our lives, and I think that much of it could and should be available, for free, to all of us, rather than mainly to financial professionals and those creating glossy annual reports. So, I disagree that yet another entity needs to be making money off providing the BASIC transparency about something as simple as historical earnings. Thank you for indulging that tangent.  I know that SE prides itself on focused answers.  A wonderful resource that I greatly appreciate. I use and recommend barchart.com. Again you have to register but it's free. Although it's a US system it has a full listing of UK stocks and ETFs under International > London. The big advantage of barchart.com is that you can do advanced technical screening with Stochastics and RS, new highs and lows, moving averages etc. You're not stuck with just fundamentals, which in my opinion belong to a previous era. Even if you don't share that opinion you'd still find barchart.com useful for UK stocks. I think Infochimps has what you are looking for: NYSE and NASDAQ. "A Bloomberg terminal connected to Excel provides the value correcting splits, dividends, etc. Problem is it cost around $25,000. Another one which is free and I think that takes care of corporate action is ""quandl.com"". See an example here." I love technical analysis, and use candlesticks as part of my technical analysis system for trading mutual funds in my 401K. However, I would never use a candlestick chart on its own.  I use combination of candlesticks, 2 different EMAs, MACD, bollinger bands, RSI and hand drawn trend lines that I constantly tweak.  That's about as much data input as I can handle, but it is possible to graph it all at once and see it at a glance if you have the right trading platform. My approach is very personal, not very aggressive, and took me years to develop. But it's fairly effective - 90% + of my trades are winners. The big advantage of technical analysis is that it forces you to create repeatable rules around which you base your trading.  A lot of the time I have little attention at all on what fund I am trading or why it is doing well in that particular market condition. It's basically irrelevant as the technical system tells when to buy and sell, and stops you trying to second guess whether housing, chemicals, gold or asian tigers are is doing well right now. If you don't keep to your own rules, you have only yourself to blame. This keeps you from blaming the market, which is completely out of your control. I explain many of my trades with anotated graphs at http://neurotrade.blogspot.com/ TL; DR version of my answer: In view of your age and the fact that you have just opened a Roth IRA account with Vanguard, choose the Reinvest Dividend and Capital Gains distributions option. If Vanguard is offering an option of having earnings put into a money market settlement account, it might be that you have opened your Roth IRA account with Vanguard's brokerage firm. Are you doing things like investing your Roth money into CDs or bonds (including zero-coupon or STRIP bonds) or individual stocks? If so, then the money market settlement account (might be VMMXX, the Vanguard Prime Money Market Fund) within the Roth IRA account is where all the money earned as interest on the CDs or bonds, dividends from the stocks, and the proceeds (including any resulting capital gains) from the sales of any of these will go. You can then decide where to invest that money (all within the Roth IRA). Leaving the money in the settlement account for a long time is not a good idea even if you are just accumulating the money so as to be able to buy 100 shares of APPL or GOOG at some time in the future. Put it into a CD in your Roth IRA brokerage account while you wait. If your Roth IRA is invested only in Vanguard's mutual funds and is likely to remain so in the foreseeable future, then you don't really need an account with their brokerage. You can still use a money market settlement fund to transfer money between various mutual fund investments within the Roth IRA account, but it really is adding an extra layer of money movement where it is not really necessary. You can sell one Vanguard mutual fund and invest the proceeds into another Vanguard mutual fund or even into several Vanguard funds without needing to have the funds transit through a money market account.  Vanguard calls such a transaction an Exchange on their site. And, of course, you can just choose to reinvest all the dividends and capital gains distributions made by a mutual fund into the fund itself. Mutual funds allow purchases of fractional shares (down to three or even four decimal places) instead of insisting on integer numbers of shares let alone round lots of 100 shares. All this, of course, within the Roth IRA. Unless you're running a self-employed business with a significant turnover (more than £150k), you are entitled to use cash basis accounting for your tax return, which means you would put the date of transactions as the payment date rather than the billing date or the date a debt is incurred. For payments which have a lag, e.g. a cheque that needs to be paid in or a bank transfer that takes a few days, you might also need to choose between multiple payment dates, e.g. when you initiated the payment or when it took effect. You can pick one as long as you're consistent: You can choose how you record when money is received or    paid (eg the date the money enters your account or the date a cheque   is written) but you must use the same method each tax year.