Every brainchild of human thought seems to be inevitably fraught with complications, especially when money is mixed in. It pains one to visualize the inner workings of something like the stock market, especially now that the world is besieged by global economic and financial recession. Many known companies have already fallen to the tempest of crisis, and many more are poised to tumble. With such influential organizations rising and falling, stock traders need all the help they can get trying to make sense of stock market figures that might some might even try their luck in automated trading via trading software.

Putting a computer’s excellent data gathering and analysis skills to use, stock market software is one of the more useful things that had come out of the mesh of the World Wide Web that has today become commonplace. Such software range from simple observational systems that collect and organize data to analysis programs that analyze the collected figures to decision making software that forecasts trends in the market and buys and sells accordingly based on the gathered and analyzed data. The data observation and gathering plus the analysis parts make such stock trading software virtual assistants to stock traders and are quite accurate and useful. But the decision making software is rather dubious.

It may be true that a computer is the best machine to analyze such twisted data as stock market figures and also best suited for performing the analysis based on a predefined principle or theorem like fundamental or technical analysis, but it is also true that the stock market can at times be beyond logic. The 1987 stock market crash for example; until now, no probable cause has ever been proven to cause a drop of 22. 6% in the Dow Jones Index. None logical, at least. Even if today’s computers had been there, they could not have been able to foretell such an event happening. This is still the case today. No computer can accurately forecast an outlier possibility in a Normal distribution of trends and in so doing take advantage of it. And then there’s Professor Eugene Fama’s Efficient Market Hypothesis that directly contradicts a computer’s potential to outperform the market. Stating that it is not possible to consistently outperform the market from information from the market, though the hypothesis has its drawbacks and contenders, is sound enough to ring true for the case of a investment software.

And of course, a computer can’t account for the psychological aspect of the stock market where overreaction or the opposite can result in over or under pricing. All in all, with regards to data, computers and programs are excellent observers and analysts, but all calls are still best left to Homo sapiens.