Well-stated. Clearly, if becoming a profitable trader were just a matter of shelling out dollars for a trading platform, there would be a lot more profitable traders. In fact, for me, I had to break the boundaries of an approach of a mentor of mine, which, although it worked, i.e. had positive expectancy, left me wanting more.
Due to the unconventiality of my approach (I use that word reservedly because I am not really the proper judge of whether my approach is unconventional, but I use it also because I've never seen any discussion here of the things I consider most important in trading, so I take the absence of those discussions as indicative that they are not important to others, which is fine by me), I had to build my own tools from scratch and Excel is my program of choice. Nothing I do is visual nor does it require any real-time analysis beyond some simple math. I also have Excel databases which houses all of the background data which drives my trade logic and my past trade results for post-trade analysis, but even for that Excel is more suited than a relational database would be.
