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OptionGear Review - Is the Cost Reflected in the Benefits?

This OptionGear Review is provided for the purpose of providing you with an honest opinion about whether this software is worth the purchase price in comparison to other freely available option analysis tools you can access today.

In Australia, OptionGear is the property of the Hubb Financial Group and has received some bad press including slow loading, continual crashing and inaccurate data. In the United States, the software is owned by OptionsXpress Holdings Inc.

OptionsXpress are options brokers who provide their own downloadable and standalone trading platform called Xtend, so it appears that in obtaining the rights to OptionGear, they have positioned themselves to be able to offer more advanced options analysis tools to their clients than their Xtend platform provides .

I have used Xtend and to be honest, it is not only very basic, but not even as intuitive to use as their web based trading is. I found it disappointing.

OptionGear Review - Features of the Software

Apart from the expected charting and technical analysis aspects of the software, OptionGear also claims to provide a market scanner, which scans 10,000 stocks and compares them with your predefined criteria.

Among the criteria are things like Bollinger Band contraction or expansion, consolidating or exploding stocks, momentum indicators and volume spikes. But most of these criteria can be found at the OptionXpress website under their "Tools" menu - so I can't see much extra value in paying a lot of money for a scanner of this calibre.

Personally, I would rather pay MarketClub the much smaller fee that they ask for and take advantage of all the wonderful tools that they offer - which includes a more advanced market scanner.

Another OptionGear feature is a 'Portfolio Manager' - where you can keep a list of stocks or options that you're interested in and follow them. This is nothing special. Most good brokers or information providers such as MarketClub give you exactly the same thing.

Next in our OptionGear Review are the Options Calculators. These will analyse any options that you're looking at and tell you how fairly valued they are.

Unfortunately however, you have to manually enter some of the information which makes it cumbersome. There are much more sophisticated and dynamically interactive tools online these days and you can get them for free.

If you're in the United States, just take a look at what ThinkorSwim by TD Ameritrade offers. They have what I consider to be the best dynamic option analysis tools in the world - and it's all free if you have a trading account with them.

OptionGear Review - Summary of Findings

In summary, I wouldn't personally recommend OptionGear software to anyone serious about trading options. Last time I checked, the price was around $4,000 with a 30 day money back guarantee.

But from what I can see, you can get most of these tools for free, if you choose the right broker, or for a much more reasonable cost through very reputable and proven organizations like MarketClub.

Comparing a $4,000 lump sum outlay for OptionGear with MarketClub's $8.95 for the first 30 days offer, I know what I'd be trying first.

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