MarketBrowser is a stock charting program that enables users to perform their own technical analysis. The free version provides windows for 12 separate charts and offers numerous technical indicators. However, the prices are displayed at a 20-minute delay.

After installing and opening the program, populate the charts with the companies you want to track by clicking on each window and entering the ticker symbol. A graph of the date and price will be shown for a one-year period by default, but the time frame can be changed to up to 50 years. The Favorites dropdown menu allows you to plot charts for the Dow, NASDAQ and S&P 500. Each of these charts can be expanded to fill the entire program screen.

Numerous technical indicators can be overlaid on the charts, including Bollinger bands, percentage bands, moving averages and parabolic SAR (stop and reverse), along with several others. In addition, you have the ability to overlay other company charts on the original for comparison purposes.

MarketBrowser offers a wide variety of economic charts as well. These charts provide invaluable information and include categories such as banking, gross domestic product (GDP) and employment and population, just to name a few. Within each category is another list of selections that allow you to specify the economic chart of interest. For example, the employment and population category includes sections that display in a chart the civilians unemployed for less than five weeks over time and all the employees in leisure and hospitality over time, along with many others. These graphs allow you to visualize trends in economic data.

Links to quite a few prominent investment sites are also built into the program. In the DrillDown menu, a single click gives you access to pages such as company profile, performance, analyst ratings, earnings estimates and SEC files from websites including Morningstar.com, CNN Money, Reuters and Yahoo! Finance. A separate NASDAQ dropdown menu is also provided, with links to useful NASDAQ pages.

The program provides a help menu that brings you to the Getting Started page. This section of the website includes screen shots, and it does an outstanding job of helping users get started using the program and explaining its abilities. The program is very simple, and for those who know their way around a computer, the help section may not even be needed.

In conclusion, MarketBrowser provides superb charting and technical analysis capabilities free of charge. For those looking for additional features, MarketBrowser Advanced Edition is now available and offers 64 live charts. However, MarketBrowser is sufficient for most individual investors.

MarketBrowser

www.marketbrowser.com

System: Windows 7, Windows 2003, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows Server 2008

Price: Free; $275/year for Advanced Edition

Click here to download.