I held back on moving to ProTA 4. It seemed much easier to stay with ProTA 3.25, rather than learn the new features of 4. That was a mistake. ProTA 4 is going to save me a lot of time and effort.
I like to document trades by printing out a chart. I never liked the ProTA 3.25 chart printing feature, but the ProTA 4 prints accurate charts right from within the program. In 3.25 I had been doing a screen capture, opening the chart in Preview and printing from there.
In 3.25 I had been opening multi-chart chart suites by double clicking. It takes about 3 seconds to plot my chart suites in 3.25. In 4 I take advantage of the Preferences feature "Notify Open Chart Suites to Use the Same Ticker". In 4 I can plot the same amount of information in less than a second, by using the return key (double clicking not necessary).
In 3.25 I had always wished that when using the line tool that it wouldn't keep defaulting back to "trendline" after I plotted a vertical line, etc. 4 has a "stick" option that holds the last line tool used.
Also, 4 has a powerful search tool for chart suites and custom indicators. 3.25 does not. When you have as many charts and indicators as I do, that is a fantastic help.
I have always complained that 3.25 had no provision to allow searches of any time frame but daily, for trading system testing and scans. 4 has a feature called "Pragmas" which has a command that allows searching of multiple time frames.
I'm a dividend investor. In 3.25 I manually searched for dividends on internet sites and put them in the Open Interest column. 4 has a Pragma that gives you the dividend.
Also wonderful is the fact that 4 is up-to date with the operating system. I have suffered many crashes of 3.25. I kept saving my work on short intervals to avoid data loss. One time, after a 3.25 crash it took me all day to get the program working again (I had to replace the application with a "clean install" (a copy of 3.25 that hadn't been used)). I'm not sure what the cause is, but I haven't had that problem with 4, and I have been using it for about 3 weeks now.
Another cool feature is the ability to put the program on an external drive, so you can lock up your disc (security feature).
I am still working my way through the User Manual, but so far, I haven't found anything that's not something I consider an improvement.
It is a really complex program with a lot of features. That characteristic is somewhat daunting to a new user, but the time spent learning the features is paid back in time saved. |
