ProRealTime Review – How Does This Trading Software Rank?

About ProRealTime

ProRealTime is a popular technical analysis platform that supports automated trading and a wide variety of assets. According to the company, the software has more than 825,000 users around the world, in part because it’s used by major brokers such as IG and Interactive Brokers. ProRealTime charges a monthly subscription for real-time exchange data, so it can be prohibitively expensive for non-professional traders.

ProRealTime Pricing Options

ProRealTime is available for free. You get all of the software’s historical data, automation features, and charting tools at no cost. The catch is that free users will only receive price data at the end of each trading day.

For real-time price data, the software costs $36.55 per month. If you sign up for more than one year, the price drops to $31.07 per month, and if you sign up for more than three years, it drops to $25.58 per month. Critically, this only includes forex data – data for stocks and futures is sold separately on an exchange basis. NASDAQ and NYSE data each cost an additional $10.98 per month, while London Stock Exchange data costs an additional $23.18 per month. Most other global exchanges are also priced at $10.98 per month.

ProRealTime also has a premium subscription available. This increases the amount of historical data you have access to. By how much depends on the price timeframe and the asset, but it’s generally a significant increase in data volume. It also adds premium support, enables you to create groups of charts, and allows for more simultaneous automated trading systems and market scans.

ProRealTime Features

Assets

One of the major advantages of ProRealTime is that it supports analysis and automated trading for a wide variety of assets. This software works not only for stock and forex trading, but also for index and commodity futures, contracts for difference (CFDs), bonds, and options. 

Given how much data is baked into the software, it’s surprisingly easy to find the asset you’re looking for. There’s a simple search tool at the top of the charting interface along with a panel that is just a list of available instruments. You can filter the list by market or asset type, or create your own custom watchlists.

Technical Charting and Indicators

Technical charts are at the heart of ProRealTime. By default, the platform displays three different charts for a single asset so that you can monitor multiple timeframes simultaneously. 

The charting tools are extremely robust, similar to those you’d find on TradingView or eSignal. There are more than 130 indicators built into ProRealTime, and they are as customizable as you’d expect from a high-caliber trading platform. You can tweak everything from the parameters that go into calculating an indicator to the color of the display on your chart. While the aesthetic options might seem like overkill, they actually make it much easier to overlay numerous indicators on a single chart. 

There are also plenty of drawing tools, including for common patterns like Fibonacci retracements, triangles, head and shoulders patterns, and channels. You can even use the drawing tools to set price alerts right from a chart.

Notably, ProRealTime offers the option to create your own indicators as well. However, this requires using the built-in code editor, which isn’t as user-friendly as what similar trading platforms provide. There isn’t an easy way to pull in existing indicators to modify their code, and the code suggestions feature wasn’t as helpful as we expected.

One of the best things about ProRealTime’s analysis features is that charts are automatically annotated with support and resistance trendlines. Major and minor support/resistance levels can be colored or dashed differently, so it’s immediately clear what is happening when you first look at a chart.

ProScreener

ProRealTime also includes an advanced market screening tool that takes advantage of the wealth of indicators the platform ships with. There is a handful of predefined screens, or else you can use a wizard-like tool to build custom screens. One thing to keep in mind is that the screener only works for stocks, stock CFDs, and forex, and you cannot search for characteristics like high volatility across multiple asset types at once. 

ProBacktest And Automatic Trading

The main reason to pay for ProRealTime’s expensive real-time subscription and data feeds is its support for automated trading. This platform enables you to define a strategy using any combination of indicators (what it calls ‘Simplified creation’) or using the ProRealTime code builder. Once you’ve assembled a strategy, you can backtest it using the ProBacktest module.

This is an advanced backtesting tool. You can define the trade commissions and spreads to get a truer sense of the profitability of your strategy, as well as set a maximum position size for forex tests. If your strategy needs tuning, you can use the code builder to convert one of your parameters to a dummy variable, and ProRealTime will optimize it for you. The backtest results clearly show your win rate, maximum gain and loss, and other details needed to manage risk and assess your strategy.

The automatic trading module is side-by-side with ProBacktest, so it’s straightforward to unleash a finished strategy on the market.

ProRealTime Customization And Layout

ProRealTime offers a fair amount of customization. One thing that was nice off the bat is that the software recognizes your screen resolution and enables you to change the magnification of the program. It’s a small detail, but it makes ProRealTime much easier to use.

As we noted, chart overlays and charts come with a number of design parameters to make it easier to keep track of your work. Almost everything you do in the software can be saved as a layout or default for future use. If you use ProRealTime Premium, you also get access to chart groups that you can use to organize charts across multiple monitors.

It’s worth noting that ProRealTime offers a mobile app for iOS and Android devices. You get the same charts as on the desktop software, but using ProRealTime on a small screen can be something of a frustrating experience. The best thing about having the mobile app installed is that price alerts are automatically pushed to your smartphone. So, you can stay on top of the market (or an automated trading strategy) even when you’re away from your computer.

Compatible Brokerages

ProRealTime offers integration with IG and Interactive Brokers. You can also open a paper trading account, although this requires a real-time data subscription.

ProRealTime Platform Differentiators

ProRealTime is an incredibly powerful platform for technical analysis. It differentiates itself from fully free competitors like Thinkorswim (from TD Ameritrade) by offering a wider range of assets. Whereas Thinkorswim is built around US stocks and stock options with some forex capabilities, ProRealTime fully supports forex, global stocks, CFDs, and commodities.

Another key distinction for ProRealTime is the platform’s support for strategy development, backtesting, and automation. ProRealTime has one of the most thorough backtesting tools we’ve seen, although coding in a custom strategy takes a significant amount of work. The fact that you can easily automate your custom strategy – and in fact, run multiple automated strategies at once – is a huge selling point for this software. 

What Type Of Trader Is ProRealTime Best For?

ProRealTime is best suited for advanced traders who can take advantage of its backtesting and automation features. This software is expensive once data feeds are considered, and the strategy development tools are where most of its value over free technical analysis software lies.

That said, the free version of ProRealTime, which offers end-of-day data, can also be quite useful for swing traders and less-experienced traders. The automated trendline analysis is extremely helpful, and the software’s many drawing and technical analysis tools are excellent for identifying setups before the next trading day. 

Pros

• Supports stocks, forex, CFDs, futures, bonds, and options
• Automated trendline analysis
• Wide variety of indicators with tons of customization
• Very advanced backtesting tool and automated trading
• Mobile app with price alerts

Cons

• Expensive stock and index data feeds
• Screener could be more flexible for multi-asset searches