AmiBroker
AmiBroker offers a robust backtesting service at a relatively low price. For that reason, it’s a popular choice with people who are getting started in day trading. It also allows users to make sophisticated technical charts that they can use to monitor the markets. One drawback is that you may have to pay extra for the market price quote data, depending on what securities and time periods you want to test.Strategy Tester
Charles Schwab's Strategy Tester lets you test your trading idea. Then you can set it into a Strategy Ticker, which follows your strategy while the market is open, enabling you to see how your strategy performs in real time. This isn’t quite the same as paper trading because it isn’t testing how well you would pull the trigger.Investor/RT
Developed by a company called Linn Software, Investor/RT allows you to develop your own tests and create your own programs. It has packages for Macintosh OS X, which makes it popular with traders who prefer Apple computers. Its users tend to be sophisticated about their trading systems and backtesting requirements; this software isn't really for beginners.MetaStock
As the name implies, MetaStock is designed for traders who work in stocks, although a MetaStock package is available especially for currency traders, and the regular packages include capabilities for futures and commodities traders.It defines traders as end-of-day (those who make decisions about trading tomorrow based on numbers at the end of today's trading) and as real-time (those who make decisions during the trading day). Most day traders are real-time traders. The company is owned by Thomson Reuters, a major financial information services company.