Mac users, fortunately, haven't been left out of the hunt. With specialized software, and compliance from major online trading firms, investors with Macs have found a new world of independence with online trading. Still, there are some drawbacks to being a Mac user in the Internet trading game.

Getting the Info

Galleon Software produces a powerful Macintosh-only investment tool called MacTicker. It's essentially a simple application that lets users view the free stock market information provided online by financial web sites around the world. The software basically bottles the stock market information available on the Internet and puts it in a tidy interface.

MacTicker updates this information once a minute directly to the Macintosh desktop. Users can configure it to alert you to stocks that are doing particularly well, or warn users to sell a losing stock. You can get more information on this app at http://www.galleon.com/macticker/index.html.

Mac OS 8.5 users can even get their own personal stock detective on the job. Raul Gutierrez has written a plug-in for Apple's Sherlock searching tool that incorporates "http://www.dailystocks.com/" into Sherlock's searching capabilities.

Making the buy

Mac users can take the easy route and simply pick one of the major online brokerage firms that have sprouted up over the past couple years. Here's a few to choose from:

E-Trade is one of the most famous on-line brokerage institutions. It features commissions as low as $14.95. One of the key advantages to this service is that it can be accessed via the Web, AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy Internet, Microsoft Investor, WebTV, direct modem connection, and TELE*MASTER, the company's proprietary touchtone and speech recognition telephone investing system.

Discover Brokerage Direct's claim to fame is that it was rated the best overall online brokerage for three years by Barron's (one of the most respected financial information sources in existence.) Like E-trade, Discover offers commissions as low as $14.95 .

Ameritrade hypes its extremely low commissions of as low as $8 per trade. Among features that will be appearing soon on the service are free Real-Time Quotes, and the ability to add up to 35 symbols at a time to the list of stocks you want to watch. Despite its low commissions, Ameritrade isn't for everyone. It requires a $2,000 minimum deposit.

Analyzing your Picks

MacChart is a tool that allows users to chart the past performance of stocks, funds, and other investment opportunities. Its authors say the app provides "sophisticated technical analysis". MacChart works with stocks, mutual funds, market indexes, commodities, and futures. You can grab this software from ftp://ftp.macchart.com/MacChart.hqx.

Perhaps some more advanced software is "Personal Hotline" from Trendsetter Software. The company makes the bold claim that Personal Hotline is "far and away the most robust charting and analysis product available for the Mac." It includes "Personal Trade Tracking," which summarizes users' open positions daily and analyzes your trading results historically. An "Expert Trading Model," that makes buy, sell and stop-loss recommendations, and tracks its theoretical performance just as it tracks your real or paper trades. There's also the "DayTrader" System which makes daily recommendations for day trading commodities and stocks.

How about a tool for you Mac/Palm heads? Portfolio Manager is an app for the Palm OS 2.0 which helps users keep track of the transactions they've made, profits and losses, and the overall status of their portfolio. In addition, the program will calculate the commission automatically, and the profit and loss will be reflected accurately. Data can also be exported to your Mac so that you can carry out further analysis.

Yet another tool is Tradex, a stock market technical analysis and portfolio manager. It's authors say "(Tradex) has been designed as a sophisticated tool for the reasonably experienced or expert technical analysts to evaluate stocks with respect to their historical prices and volumes." Among the calculations included are a 12-period moving average, a 7-period moving average of that 12-period moving average, the momentum of the 7-period moving average, and more.

Of course, the investment world is serious business. While Macs may make it extremely easy to get involved and stay informed in the quickly growing online trading market, no amount of information or analysis can assure returns on your money. Step into the online trading arena with caution.