First Principles · Updated August 2026
Strip away forty years of marketing and MetaStock is one idea done thoroughly: a workbench for testing what you believe about price before you bet money on it. Here is the software explained for someone learning, not someone being sold to.
The core idea
MetaStock is Windows desktop software for technical analysis: the discipline of studying price and volume history to inform decisions about when to buy and sell stocks, forex, futures and commodities. Everything in the program serves that one discipline. It charts price so you can see structure, scans markets so you can find setups, backtests rules so you can check them against history, and projects probabilities so you can frame what might come next.
Just as defining is what it deliberately is not. MetaStock does not connect to a broker and place trades: analysis happens here, execution happens at your broker. It has no AI making picks for you. It hands you no strategy in a box. It is closer to a laboratory than an oracle, and that is precisely why it suits people who want to learn the craft: the software assumes the method is yours, then gives you industrial-grade tools to build and test it.
The lineage
The history explains the depth. Equis International, founded by Steve Achelis in 1982, shipped MetaStock 1.0 in 1986, when charting software meant floppy disks and dial-up data. Reuters acquired Equis in 1996, folding it into what became Thomson Reuters, and in 2013 the MetaStock business was sold to Innovative Market Analysis, who develop it today. The current release is MetaStock 20.
Four decades of continuous development is rare in trading software, and it shows in the toolbox: features accumulate, get refined, and occasionally get promoted, like Japanese candle pattern recognition, once a US$399 add-on and now included free. The Refinitiv-powered XENITH data connection is the modern echo of the Reuters years: professional-grade news and market data feeding a private trader's desk. (If a page tells you MetaStock is still "a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters", it is thirteen years out of date; plenty of pages do.)
The tools
The feature list is long (300+ indicators, 58 built-in Expert Advisors, around 49 third-party add-ons), but every tool in MetaStock 20 maps to one of four jobs:
The thread joining them is the formula language. Indicators, scans and system tests are all written in it, which means one learnable skill unlocks the serious half of the software. That is why our free formula language course exists, and why we push every new user toward it.
The practicalities
MetaStock comes in two editions matched to two kinds of trader: D/C (Daily Charts) for people who analyse after the market closes, indicatively from about US$59/month or about US$499 one-time, and R/T (Real Time) for intraday traders, indicatively from about US$100/month, with current figures confirmed at MetaStock's checkout. Market data is a separate subscription either way; the data guide explains the 2026 options. It runs on 64-bit Windows 10/11, with Mac users going via Parallels, per the requirements page.
From here, three good next steps depending on your question. "How do I use it?": the getting-started guide. "Is it any good?": the sister site's full honest review, weaknesses included. Everything else: the plain-answer FAQ.
Thirty days with the full version teaches you more about what MetaStock is than any explainer. Open your own watchlist and see.
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