Choose the Manual or Automated Stock Trading Software That Is Right for You

Once you’ve made a decision to invest in the stock market, your next investment should be to acquire some kind of manual or automated stock trading software. Determining what type of software you need is probably the biggest hurdle to overcome.

What Type of Trader Are You?

The first variable is the type of trading that you do. Day traders and long-term investors will require different types of stock trading software that are designed for their needs.

Three Major Types of Software

The next step is deciding what exactly you want your software to do for you.

  • Execution software is just that: software that allows you to execute trades using your computer and the Internet. Everybody will need some type of execution software, but again, the type of investor you are will dictate what types of software you should be looking for.
  • Charting software allows you to track trends over specified periods of time for whatever stock symbol(s) you input. You can look at fluctuations from one day to the next or over a twenty-year period.
  • Specialty trading software offers additional applications: anything from breaking news to new highs and lows. You generally do not need to start out with specialty software, but it may be something that you want to add in as you go.

Assess Your Budget

As with any computer-related purchase, the amount of money you can spend will be the major influence on what stock market trading software you select. Obviously, the more money you can invest in a software program, the more it will be able to do for you, but remember that it may also be more complicated to navigate due to increased options. No matter what your budget, a free demo or trial is always a good idea before you buy. This way, you can see if the system is easy for you to understand and use.

Read the Reviews

Going online to do some comparison shopping is the best way to pick out software. There are many sites where you can read user reviews of different stock trading programs. You will also be able to see which programs offer the free limited versions for you to test out.

Remember the Risk

Keep in mind that investing in the stock market is inherently risky; that is why it presents the opportunity for high returns. No software program can reduce your risk. Ultimately, investment decisions are up to a human being, so the best protection is being knowledgeable and staying informed.

Dog Nutrition – Not Just About the Diet

Dog food nutrition is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle for your pet. Dogs, just like everyone else, have specific nutritional needs. Dogs lack the ability to communicate their problems, so it’s up to their owners to determine how healthy they are. Diet directly affects your dog’s skin and coat, weight, energy level, and gastrointestinal function. Diet, environmental toxins, pharmaceuticals and stress all play a part in the health of companion animals. Dog nutrition influences overall health, including skin and coat condition.

Feeding your dog can be done in three different ways: dog food purchased at the supermarket, dog food made at home or a combination of both. If you do decide to purchase commercial dog food I would suggest doing some reading up about it, in the past few years many commercial dog foods have had to be recalled due to contaminants that are found in dog food. Many dog owners are increasingly choosing holistic dog food, over the commercially available pet food, in a bid to introduce their dogs to a healthier, more balanced diet. Dog food should contain little or no fillers at all, but most of them do so your actually not giving your dog the correct diet it needs to be healthy. Many recipes can be found on the Internet for dog meals you can make from your home.

Aside from what you choose to feed your dog it is important to ensure that your dog is not be given access to food all the time. This can create obesity, which can create a variety of different illness for your dog. Free-feeding is also very unhelpful for the training of meal times in puppies and leaving food out in hot summer months can bring flies, mites and other various rodents out of the woodwork. It is suggested your dog is on a feeding schedule and remember to only give the amount prescribed by your vet, too much food can also create obesity. Remember, dogs are scavengers; an empty bowl is often a trigger for pleading or browsing behaviour and does not mean that your dog is starving.

Feeding your dog table scraps can also be a bad training and nutrition habit. Your dog will beg while you eat your dinner, which can be uncomfortable for guests but also human fats, and foods are not always good for your dog as they are for you. I suggest feeding your family while your dog eats his food in another room. This way he won’t feel left out.

Dogs have shorter digestive tracts than humans and larger chunks can upset your dogs’ stomach. Your dog needs a meat-based diet, high in protein (which isn’t stored as fat) and fat and low in carbohydrate. Nutrition isn’t always about diet. Good nutrition leads to good health and so do many other things, such as exercise, keeping its weight down (through good nutrition and regular exercise) keeping its teeth clean (next to obesity, periodontal disease is the one most commonly seen in the vet’s office) getting it to the vet for regular check-ups being observant about symptoms that might indicate a health problem and getting prompt and appropriate veterinary attention (information below).

You might also want to consider alternative treatments for any sickness or allergy your dog has. These may include nutrition, herbs, acupuncture, chiropractic, and massage, as well as traditional medicines. These alternatives are all natural and better for your dog’s body than chemical drugs and have no side effects at all. As more people understand the importance of nutrition to their own health, they’re starting to consider what’s in their dog’s food bowl as well. Maximum nutrition dog food can do a lot for your dog’s well being by improving its appearance, energy level and general state of health.

Learn what you should be feeding your dog at every stage of its life. By understanding what puppies eat in the wild, you will learn valuable clues as to what you should be feeding your domestic pup. The degree to which modern dogs experience ill health reflects the degree to which they are subjected to biologically inappropriate methods of feeding and exercising. If your dog constantly leaves some food in the bowl, you are probably feeding too much food. Maintain your dog’s nutrition, food, diet, and eating habits and he/she will live a joyful life with you and your loved ones.

An Introduction to the Magento E-Commerce Platform

Magento is an open source e-commerce platform. An e-commerce platform like Magento allows a business to setup a website selling products to customers online, while providing an administrative interface where the business can manage their products, customers, orders among other things.

Magento was first released in 2008 and since then it’s grown to become the most popular e-commerce platform today (30% market share in May 2015) and is now powering over 200,000 online stores.

Magento has a free Community Edition (CE), and a pay-per-year Enterprise Edition (EE), and in this post we will mainly discuss the Community Edition and where it stands out from other e-commerce platforms.

Hosted vs self-hosted

Some e-commerce platforms are hosted, that is, they are tied to the hosting of the company. Setting up an e-commerce site with them is alike to renting a service; your e-commerce site is tied to their system. This has an advantage in that it is very easy to set up and get started, but the downside is that you don’t truly own your own site and become reliant on the provider.

Magento, on the other hand, is self-hosted, which means have your own copy of the site. The downside is that it is up to you (or your developer) to find a hosting provider to set up the platform on. The advantage though is that you completely own the site, can do any modifications you wish, and can move it to another hosting provider at any time.

Internationalization

Features for international support is built right into the platform. Support for multiple languages, multiple currencies, tax configuration and VAT are a standard part of the system and easily set up and configured from the administration panel.

Theming & Multiple Stores

Magento allows the owner to switch the theme (look) of the site without changing any functionality. Multiple “front stores”, which can be switched between by the customer and is often used to provide different language versions of the site, is built right into the platform.

A powerful feature of Magento is that it can run several websites outwards while sharing the same products and customers among the websites, all managed from the same administration interface.

Open Source

Magento itself is an open source platform, built upon open source frameworks and programming languages. This gives it the benefits of outside scrutiny into the source with the result of improved design and security, and at the same time making it more accessible for outside developers.

Customization

Because of its flexible modular architecture at its core, Magento was built to be extended. In fact, much of the core functionality of Magento are module extensions themselves built by the Magento team. This allows for an astonishing level of customization, even allowing modification of the core functionality. This level of extendability and customization sets Magento apart from other e-commerce platforms and is one of the biggest reasons for its success.

Third party extensions

Extensions allow the developer or business owner to add specific functionality to the store that is not a standard part of the platform, without having to develop that feature themselves, often saving time and money.

Magento has thousands of third party extensions, more than any other e-commerce platform, some which are free and some which are paid for.

As mentioned earlier, because of Magento’s modular architecture, extensions can modify any part of the platform allowing features that change it at its core, making extensions possible such as Reward Points that adds reward points to customer when buying products which can then be used for discounts at checkout.

Other features

Other features Magento comes built in with includes a very powerful and extremely flexible promotion and discount rule system, multiple front & store support (mentioned earlier), configurable dynamic product attribute system, sales and order tracking system, excel import and export of products, a Content Management System (CMS), newsletters and many more.

Costs

Magento requires a decent hosting server to run well; this is a consequence of Magento’s feature rich and extendable architecture. Shared hosting is not recommended, so there may be extra cost involved in setting up a dedicated server.

As mentioned earlier, the community edition which we have discussed so far is free and comes with more features than any other e-commerce platform. In the case of a site that does not require many additional features, this option can be very affordable.

Where it can become costly is when features outside of Magento’s standard palette is required because of the time and skill required to develop them. Third-party extensions are often used to extend Magento and common price range is 50 – 200 USD per extension. Compared with developing the functionality yourself this is often a great cost saving.

Magento Enterprise Edition

A quick word on Magento Enterprise Edition. This is the non-free edition of Magento, costing around 15,000 USD per year. Most suitable for very large clients, it offers additional features such as increased security, performance, functionality such as in-store credit, gift cards, ERP integration, among many others. Finally, with Enterprise Edition you get access to full around the clock professional support from Magento through phone and email.

Summary

Magento offers a complete e-commerce platform solution. The free community edition is more than powerful enough for small to medium sized businesses, and often for large businesses as well. Where the standard features are not enough, it offers third-party extensions to expand the already feature rich platform, and Magento’s modular architecture allows skilled developers to extend and customize the platform to the business’s needs.

As Magento is currently the most powerful and popular e-commerce platform and is still growing and being developed according to the best industry standards, as well as having a growing third-party extension market, we can be certain to have a secure, up to date and well-supported platform for years or even decades to come.

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