Check out www.amibroker.com. They have an excellent program for $69 that uses free end of day quotes from Yahoo. The programming language (AFL) is very flexible and simple to use (I'm not a programmer). There supposed to be coming out with a real time version very soon, maybe by February (<$200). I've never used Metastock or AIQ, but by the looks of their websites they don't seem to be able to do much more than Amibroker can do for ALOT LESS.