While conventional trading platforms simply provide you with the most basic of charting features, TradeStation provides you with charting and alert capabilities you won't find in any other trading platform. For starters, there are no limits on the number of bars you can have on a chart, so you can make full use of TradeStation's extensive historical database to chart enormous amounts of bars when testing trading systems. And that's just the beginning. TradeStation offers you customizable features designed to give you unprecedented charting flexibility, including:

Advanced Custom Charting	Custom PaintBar & ShowMe Studies
Multi-Data Charts	Intelligent Drawing Tools
Custom Indicators with Alerts

TradeStation lets you easily create charts for any custom time interval (e.g., 2-minute or 7-minute). To change a chart's time interval, simply type the time period and click "Enter." Not only is the chart updated, but all indicators, studies and trendlines on your chart are recalculated and redrawn for you automatically. Up to 30 years of daily data, and over 13 years of stock and futures intra-day data is available on demand. Plus, you can plot 3rd party data that will enable you to plot proprietary data or data for exotic markets.   View Charting Basics Movie

TradeStation offers you an extensive range of chart types to choose from aside from the standard bar chart. These include: Bar, Candlestick, Dot on Close, Line on Close, Point and Figure and Percent Change charts. TradeStation also gives you the ability to view bar charts based on single tick or multiple ticks, or number of shares traded. So, you'll also be able to choose from user defined TickBar™, user defined VolumeBar™, Intra-Day/Minute, and Daily, Weekly and Monthly compressions. You can even test strategies and view charts on pre-market hours only, post-market hours only, pre- and post-market hours combined, or any custom times you define.

TradeStation's Multi-data Chart gives you the additional ability to combine multiple symbols and/or time intervals on one chart. You can have up to 16 subgraphs per chart. The maximum number of sub-graphs in Chart Analysis has been doubled, from 8 to 16. And by using the Global Cursor feature, you'll be able to highlight the same time period simultaneously across all the charts on your workspace, which makes comparing related symbols and charts easier. In addition, Price Axis Scaling in Chart Analysis has been enhanced to give you greater functionality and flexibility in the way symbols and indicators are displayed and can be combined. Plus, the price axis can also be compressed or expanded by simply dragging it vertically allowing you to easily change the range encompassed by the price axis.

As you'd expect, TradeStation includes an extensive library of over 100 of the most popular indicators including 7 new fundamental charting indicators. So, with a simple click of your mouse you'll be able to apply a Moving Average, Stochastic or a host of other common indicators to your chart. But, here's where TradeStation gives you truly unprecedented charting flexibility...

With TradeStation, you'll never be locked into tracking the same handful of indicators that everyone else is using. You see, thanks to TradeStation's proprietary EasyLanguage technology, you can describe almost any custom indicator from scratch. Once added, it becomes part of your library and you can easily apply it to any chart. And since all indicators in the library are written in EasyLanguage, you can easily modify them as well. This makes the number and variety of indicators you can create virtually unlimited.

You won't have to spend your time glued to your screen waiting for a move based on your indicator. All indicators have standard alerts built-in, which you can use as-is or modify. You can also write your own custom alert criteria using EasyLanguage—which you can have alert you on your screen, or sent to your pager or e-mail address—and even generate orders automatically based on your criteria.

Let's say that you noticed a specific bar chart pattern that seems to have resulted many times in a major market turn. And it seems to occur repeatedly. Is it a coincidence, or have you discovered a potentially reoccurring pattern? ShowMe Studies can help you decide by placing a colored dot over bars where that specific condition occurred.

For instance, you can mark gap-up turnaround bars on your chart instantly. Or you can automatically mark every bar where volume was 30% greater than the average volume of the previous 20 bars. Once TradeStation has marked these occurrences on your chart, you'll be able to quickly scan the chart to see if the market moved as you expected after each occurrence. Not only will these bars be marked historically, but by enabling the alert feature, they will also be monitored for you on a real-time basis.

You'll have 22 built-in ShowMe Studies with alerts based on popular indicators, and you can create your own custom ShowMe Studies with EasyLanguage.

But, what if you wanted to pinpoint when the market was in a certain mode as opposed to highlighting single occurrences? TradeStation lets you do that as well.

With PaintBar Studies you'll be able to ask TradeStation to paint a series of bars on your chart a different color to highlight specific market activity. For example, you'll be able to quickly scan your chart to see when the slow moving average is above the fast moving average. TradeStation will automatically display those bars on your chart in a different color. And, of course, as with any study you create, you won't have to watch for these market activities to occur. Simply enable the alert feature, and TradeStation will let you know the instant it occurs—in real-time. TradeStation includes 19 built-in PaintBar Studies with alerts including 2 new fundamental PaintBars, and gives you the ability to create and save your own custom PaintBar Studies using EasyLanguage.

TradeStation allows you to easily measure, mark and highlight your price charts with an arsenal of intelligent drawing tools. With the ease of a drawing program, you can simply click and drag your mouse to draw, resize, move, rotate or extend Trendlines, Gann Fans, Support and Resistance lines and other objects on your chart. You'll even be able to plot space, drawing tools, and indicators to the right of your chart. You can now drag the chart background in any direction within the sub-graph.

Your drawing tools will adjust and recalculate as you drag them across your chart or change time compression on your chart. So, you won't have to redraw them. You can even have TradeStation automatically snap trendlines to the nearest open, high, low or close as you draw or move them. For example, if you draw a trendline on a 30-minute price chart, and then decide to change to a 5-minute chart, your trendline will automatically be re-drawn. This allows you to see long-term trends on short-term charts.

Your drawing tools even have pre-set and customizable alerts. So, for instance, you'll know when a trendline is penetrated, either on an intra-bar basis or on the close if you choose. TradeStation is able to monitor dozens of potential opportunities you have selected simultaneously—without you even having to look at your screen. You can have it alert on your screen, sent to your pager or e-mail address—or even automatically generate your orders based on your alert criteria. You don't even need to have the chart displayed on your screen to have TradeStation monitor that condition.

Indications are displayed in the status line when a strategy or analysis technique is applied or when a correction for a symbol is received, so you will know — at a glance — when a strategy or analysis technique is applied or when a correction is pending.  The indication also provides a way to easily change the automation, alert and pending correction(s) settings through the right mouse-button menu.