Tools for Technical Analysis

Study Notes:

As we’ve highlighted in our previous lesson, the IBKR Student Trading Lab offers an extensive toolkit to complement fundamental analysis as part of a college classroom’s curricula. Through this lesson, we’ll walk you through some of the available resources that college finance courses requiring technical analysis can use to help meet their learning objectives, including creating and configuring charts, adding studies, as well as direct you to tutorials in Traders’ Academy, along with material across the IBKR Campus, to help supplement your learning experience!

Want to improve your charting skills, or learn what it means to be a market technician?

Participants of IBKR’s Student Trading Lab have several tools at their disposal, including resources available through Trader Workstation and IBKR Mobile, as well as advanced charts and indicators housed within our Client Portal platform.

Learn to create and configure charts for a wide range of financial products, including U.S. Treasuries, equities, futures, and more. There is also a broad spectrum of studies you can employ to add technical indicators or compare secondary instruments or indexes. Change time horizons, adjust features to display lines or candles, change colors, and create multiple charts. With our charting tools, chartists, and budding technical analysts, generally find all they need to work with.

And if you want to dig into our tutorials, you can find plenty at Traders’ Academy. In our previous lesson, we explored the many tools and services available to Student Trading Lab participants for performing fundamental research, but what are the differences between fundamental and technical analysis? Through Trading & Analysis – Differences Between Fundamental Analysis & Technical Analysis, the CME will not only provide those insights, but they’ll also detail differences between trending and anti-trending markets.

Meanwhile, learn hands-on how to access and configure charts, so you can quickly visualize an event in real time!

With our Introduction to Charts course, you’ll learn how to create multiple charts, how to build and save chart templates, and for those who want to trade directly from a chart, we’ll show you TWS ChartTrader. In fact, you can learn more about ChartTrader from this Short Video!

Entry-level chartists can glean much from our Introduction to Technical Analysis course, which provides a solid overview by Adam Grimes, a long-time trader, and MarketLife’s co-founder and CEO. This course will give you a solid foundation in chart reading, understanding a trading edge, using indicators, and developing the process and skills to apply these tools in your own trading.

For those participants building their charting skills, we offer an Intermediate Technical Analysis course, also presented by the CME, where you can learn about the various patterns, indicators, and analytical techniques traders use when studying the price of a commodity. These lessons take you from learning how to read price charts to some of the more popular practices, such how to identify trend and reversal patterns, finding support and resistance levels, as well as various oscillators.

Learn More

Analysis in Practice

You can also discover technical analysis in practice across the iBKR Campus. Our podcasts and webinars, for example, will frequently use charts to illustrate discussion points. And commentary in Traders’ Insight will keep you informed of current trends – with an entire category devoted to technical analysis, including coverage from industry practitioners such as Blue Line Futures, Updata Analytics, Gramza Capital Management, Investopedia, and more.

Now available on our Cents of Security podcast series:

Technical Analysis Basics: It’s More Than a Chart

with Tyler Wood, Managing Director of CMT association

Now that we’ve provided insights into resources for learning and conducting technical analysis, we’ll next share with you some tools and services that can complement computational finance curricula in college courses.

We’ll look forward to seeing you then!