What to use instead of MetaStock

The product

MetaStock is Windows software for technical analysis on its fourth owner. Its about page, read on 9 October 2026, tells the history: Steve Achelis founded Equis International in Salt Lake City in 1982, MetaStock shipped in late 1985 and a real-time version in July 1992, Reuters bought Equis in 1996, it passed into Thomson Reuters with the 2008 merger, and on 14 June 2013 the line was sold to Innovative Market Analysis, a company Scott Brown founded that year. The same page says the company keeps "a solid working relationship" with LSEG, whose feeds power every version, and still supplies charting components to LSEG products.

The product line on the pricing guide is two programs and a data service:

• MetaStock D/C, for end-of-day, swing and position traders — 17 chart styles from candles and Equivolume to point and figure, Renko and Kagi, 150-plus indicators, the Explorer scanner, the System Tester, forecasting tools, Expert Advisors that annotate a chart with signals and commentary, and option chains with risk graphs. 499 dollars once, or 74.95 a month with data.
• MetaStock R/T, the same toolkit on tick-by-tick intraday data, 1,395 dollars once or 100 a month for the software alone.
• XENITH, the LSEG-sourced data and news service both run on. XENITH for Daily Charts is a continuously delayed global end-of-day feed at 39.95 a month; real-time XENITH is sold by region at 165 a month each, with every exchange's own fee on top.

The system requirements list PC hardware and Microsoft Office versions; there is no Mac build.

Nothing about MetaStock changed to prompt this page. People look elsewhere for the bill — R/T plus one region of real-time data is 265 dollars a month before a single exchange fee — or for a Mac, or because they used the charts and the scans and never the rest.

What to use instead

No single pick does all of what MetaStock does on the data it does it on. Break it into the four things people actually run.

The chart and its line studies. Optuma is the nearest in kind: a Windows analyst's desktop with 240-plus tools, Gann and astro modules, scans and a backtester, and its own end-of-day data across 40-plus exchanges in the box. TradingView is the broadest chart, in a browser or on any desktop, and the one with the largest library of shared indicators. MotiveWave is the specialist if Elliott Wave was why you opened MetaStock, and it runs natively on a Mac. StockCharts is the plainest: point and figure, RRG and classic charts in a browser.

The Explorer. Scanning a list against a formula is what AmiBroker's Exploration and TC2000's EasyScan do, AmiBroker on whatever data you feed it and TC2000 on its own real-time US and Canadian data. StockCharts runs scheduled scans from its website, so nothing has to be left open overnight. The stock screeners collection lists every card that filters a universe.

The System Tester. AmiBroker and WealthLab are the two to test a trading system across a portfolio rather than one symbol at a time — AmiBroker as a 299 dollar perpetual licence scripted in AFL, WealthLab as a subscription scripted in C#. TradingView's strategy tester is the lighter option, limited to the 5,000 to 40,000 bars of history its plans allow.

The data. If the software was fine and the LSEG bill was the problem, the cheapest move is to change the feed rather than the program. Norgate Data sells end-of-day US, Canadian and Australian history with delisted securities, exports in MetaStock's legacy format, and has native plugins for AmiBroker and WealthLab. For intraday data under a desktop program, IQFeed is the feed most of these connect to.

What you give up

Global end-of-day data on one bill. XENITH for Daily Charts covers, in MetaStock's words, nearly every equity exchange in North America and most in Europe and Asia, plus futures, forex and indices, with all history included, for 429.95 a year. Norgate covers three stock markets. Optuma's editions ration data groups — five on Trader. TC2000 is the US and Canada. Somebody analysing Brazilian or Indian end-of-day charts beside US ones will find that the hardest piece to replace at the same price.

Thirty years of add-ons. MetaStock's site sells third-party toolkits from well-known technicians, delivered as MetaStock indicators, explorations, system tests and Expert Advisors. None of it runs anywhere else, and the picks' own ecosystems — Pine Script's public library above all — are built from scratch rather than ported.

Very little on price. MetaStock D/C with a year of XENITH for Daily Charts is 809.95 dollars; Optuma's Trader edition is 810. AmiBroker at 299 plus Norgate's Platinum tier at 630 is 929 in the first year and 630 after it. The case for moving is fit — platform, data coverage, language — not a large saving, unless you were paying for real-time XENITH.

Migration notes

Move the data before the subscription ends. XENITH for Daily Charts includes MetaStock's Downloader, which by the vendor's description stores data in MetaStock format or converts it to CSV and TXT. Do any export while you are still subscribed, and read your data terms first: we did not find, on the pages read on 9 October 2026, whether downloaded history may be kept after cancelling.

Pick the importer, then the platform. AmiBroker reads MetaStock databases in place; Optuma imports MetaStock, CSI and CSV history on every edition; MotiveWave imports MetaStock, CSV and ASCII. Norgate's MetaStock-format export carries price and volume only, so the delisted-stock and index-membership metadata it is bought for reaches AmiBroker and WealthLab through their plugins and nowhere else.

Expect your indicators to move a little. An EMA or RSI rebuilt in another language rarely matches MetaStock to the last decimal, because seeding and smoothing conventions differ — TA-Lib carried a MetaStock compatibility mode for its EMA until release 0.8.1 removed it. Why indicator values differ explains the mechanism; check a handful of values against your old charts before trusting a rebuilt exploration.

Rewrite systems, then re-test them. A system that passed MetaStock's System Tester has to be rewritten in AFL, C# or Pine Script and tested again on the new data. Results will differ for reasons that have nothing to do with the system — fills, adjustments, and whether delisted stocks are in the universe at all. Survivorship bias is the one to check first.