Investor/RT

What it is

Investor/RT is a Windows charting, market-analysis and trading platform from Linn Software, Inc., founded in 1989 by Dr. William Linn and selling Investor/RT since 1996. Linn says it built the original footprint display in 2006, licensed out under the MarketDelta name; the feature returned to Investor/RT in 2017 as VolumeScope, and Footprint, VolumeScope and MarketDelta are all its registered trademarks. Most of its users today trade futures, chiefly CME and Eurex, and the partner list is heavy with market-profile educators, which says who it is for.

The core is a chart engine with a long indicator library, quote pages that scan up to 2,500 symbols in real time on IQFeed, alarms on indicators, and RTL, a scripting language for custom indicators, signals and scans. The Trading Rule indicator attaches a predefined order to an RTL signal, which is how automated trading is set up, and server-side OCO, OSO and trailing stops are supported through Rithmic and CQG. RTX is a C++ SDK for compiled extensions; most of the platform's newer studies are written in it, and third parties can sell their own. A playback mode with a built-in trade simulator replays sessions for practice.

Version 15, the first native 64-bit release, shipped in February 2022 and was last updated as 15.1.25 on 22 March 2024. Version 16.1 is in release-candidate stage: candidate 2, build 33670, was posted on 29 May 2026, and Linn recommends it to new subscribers and anyone routing orders to Rithmic.

Pricing

Investor/RT is bought à la carte. The Core Platform is $50 a month. Packages add $25 for Footprint (VolumeScope, the Footprint indicator and Price Volume Patterns), $20 for TPO Profile, $20 for Volume Analysis (volume breakdown, delta periodicities, bar and price statistics), $10 for Market Depth (Trail of Intentions) and $10 for Trading Systems (backtesting and optimisation). Professional Trader at $125 includes all of them. A second licence on another machine is $20, or $10 for Pro users. Quarterly and annual billing are offered on the subscribe page; the rates for them were not shown without starting checkout. An End-of-Day Edition with Trading Systems, for daily charts only, starts at $30.

The 14-day trial requires a card and an existing data source, and is open only to someone who has not trialled or subscribed in the last six months. A subscription is cancelled at least 48 hours before the billing date and runs to the end of the term.

Data & coverage

No live data from Linn. The feeds it supports are Rithmic, CQG (including StoneX), Interactive Brokers and DTN IQFeed. Linn's FAQ is unusually candid about their differences: Rithmic and CQG stream good tick-by-tick futures data but keep one to three months of history; IBKR's API data is aggregated snapshots rather than true ticks; IQFeed adds cash indices, the VIX and 700-plus market internals. Linn's own add-on, DTN Market Access at $15 a month, routes backfill to DTN's servers — up to 20 years of one-minute bars and 180 days of ticks, continuous back-adjusted futures, US stocks and ETFs, Canadian and UK stocks, and forex. About 90% of broker-feed users take it, Linn says.

Stocks, ETFs and forex trade through Interactive Brokers; crypto only as CME futures.

Integrations

Order routing to Rithmic, CQG and Interactive Brokers, with trading from the chart on all three and server-side brackets on the first two. Rithmic's plug-in mode lets several instances share one connection, which is how prop-firm evaluation accounts are traded. The ExportData extension writes chart values to a CSV or Excel file as often as you set, and DDE links pass data to other Windows programs. ChartShare publishes charts to the Linn website.

Limitations

• No data at any price tier. Budget a broker feed or IQFeed, and probably DTN Market Access for history on top.
• The headline price is the start. Core alone has no footprint, no TPO profile and no backtester; a typical order-flow setup is Core plus two packages plus DTN history.
• Windows only. The native Mac versions ended with macOS Mojave.
• IBKR is a weak data source here, by Linn's own account, for anything that needs trade-level bid and ask.
• The current release is a candidate. The public release notes stop at 15.1.25 in March 2024; 16.1 is distributed to subscribers as a beta-stage candidate.
• No options analytics. Linn's pages describe futures, stocks, ETFs and forex, not options chains.

Alternatives

Sierra Chart is the other long-lived, package-priced Windows platform favoured by profile traders. MultiCharts and NinjaTrader are the backtest-first alternatives, in PowerLanguage and C#. For footprint without the rest of the platform, ATAS or Overcharts. The rest are in trading platforms.