The Market Analysis System (MAS) is an open-source software application that provides tools for analysis of financial markets using technical analysis.
MAS provides facilities for stock charting and futures charting, including price, volume, and a wide range of technical analysis indicators. MAS also allows automated processing of market data — applying technical analysis indicators with user-selected criteria to market data to automatically generate trading signals — and can be used as the main component of a sophisticated trading system.
Some of the features of MAS are:
- Includes basic technical analysis indicators, such as Simple Moving Average, Exponential Moving Average, Stochastic, MACD, RSI, On Balance Volume, and Momentum.
- Includes more advanced indicators, such as Standard Deviation, Slope of EMA of Volume, Slope of MACD Signal Line, Bollinger Bands, and Parabolic SAR.
- User can create new technical analysis indicators, including complex indicators based on existing indicators.
- User can configure criteria for automated trading-signal generation.
- Creation of weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly data from daily data.
- Handles intraday data.
- Handles stock and futures data.
- Accepts input data from files, from a database, or from the web. (Includes a configuration for obtaining end-of-day data from yahoo.com.)
- Can be configured and run as a server that provides services for several clients at a time running on remote machines.
The current version of MAS runs on Intel machines, on both the Linux and Windows operating systems. Additionally, it has been ported to Sparc/Solaris, though it has not yet been officially released for that platform. MAS is free software (freeware).
Announcements
Version 1.6.6q of MAS has been tested successfully on Windows 2000 (5.00.2195, service pack 4), with a file-based and a web-based data source. If you've been having trouble getting MAS to work on Windows 2000 with the web option (getting data from yahoo.com), the fix described in the referenced news article may solve the problem.
The Windows XP "access denied" problem has been fixed.
Version 1.6.6t3 of the server executable, for Windows and Linux, was released on July, 2004, to provide a fix for a data format change in the yahoo.com data service.
Release 1.6.6q, a beta release, was released on February 6, 2004.
The MAS server was ported to Solaris, on December, 2003. An official release of the port is not yet available.
Invitation for MAS users to join the MAS discussion mailing list.
The latest stable release of MAS, version 1.6.5, was made available on October, 2002. Linux users who download this release please read the release notes, which contain important instructions for installing MAS on Linux systems.
Uses of MAS
MAS is a flexible system that can be used either as a personal tool — an important component in one's trading system, as described above — or, making full use of its client/server architecture, it can be installed on a powerful server and configured to serve many clients at the same time.
For example, several users can connect to the server at the same time to view stock charts with the GUI client; or MAS can be set up to run market analysis periodically on all stocks in the database and to send buy and sell signals resulting from the analysis to all users who have subscribed to this service.
Disclaimer
MAS is a powerful tool that, when used well, can save time, as well as help to increase one's profits. However, MAS is only a tool and cannot make your trading decisions for you. Trading successfully requires good discipline and requires one to take responsibility for one's decisions.
