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Techsignal Pro Intraday
The Techsignal family of cycle analysis software was developed by Richard Mogey, Research Director at the Foundation For The Study Of Cycles. The foundation itself was created by Edward Dewey, generally credited with being the father of cycle analysis as we know it today.
Techsignal Intraday Pro installed without a hitch on both my Windows XP and Win7 machines. The interface is very intuitive. Techsignal will read data series in several formats including Metastock, ASCII, Excel and Worden.
The dominant cycles within a data series are identified very quickly using spectral analysis techniques combined with the Bartels Test for confirming the genuineness of the cyclic patterns. The cycles may be displayed as sine or triangular waves, both as individual cycles or composites. Techsignal Pro also comes with several technical analysis tools built in, such as RSI, MACD, Fibonacci and Seasonal studies.
Unfortunately, this is where the good news ends.
The software appears to have been written using Visual Basic combined with C++. It is very poorly documented and I was left scratching my head as to how I could tailor the results to my own requirements. My work was continually interrupted by error messages on both of my machines, which at best crippled several features of the program and at worst shut the program down without warning on many occasions. So much so that the software is pretty much unusable.
I contacted my Customer Service Manager at the FSC several times regarding the software issues and to date have received no reply whatsoever. This is in stark contrast to the service that I received BEFORE buying the software when nothing appeared to be too much trouble.
For a software package costing several hundred dollars, the robustness and after-sales service are truly lamentable. To add insult to injury, I also find myself an unwilling participant in a continual upselling campaign encouraging me to upgrade to the higher value products costing several thousand dollars. I don't think so!
I understand that Richard Mogey is no longer involved with the FSC which may mean that there is nobody at the Foundation capable of supporting Techsignal. If that is the case, then I find it to be disappointing that the FSC continues to market such expensive software.
It would also appear that the Foundation has changed course from being a 'non-profit organisation created to foster, promote, and conduct scientific research in respect to rhythmic and periodic fluctuations in any branch of science' to a vendor of trading signals and software.
Reluctantly, I must advise anybody interested in this kind of research to give the Foundation For The Study Of Cycles and Techsignal a very wide berth indeed. There are far better software packages on the market, such as Timing Solution, which is reviewed else where on this site.