northam,
I have no idea what will happen. It would bother me a little if QT shut down very soon, but that's only because I spent hours and hours setting up a ton of sector portfolios, each containing at least a dozen stocks, and then writing color-bar formulas and setting alerts for the 3/8/20 system I'm developing. If QT shuts down in the midst of next winter I probably wont care because by then I will have everything I want to do transported over to Excel where I can do more sophisticated things (and Excel is going to be around forever -- at least my personal forever).
I think I started with QT about four years ago, mainly because I wanted to get more involved with intra-day data and be able to set alerts. Don't really remember the date. It's easy to get intra-day charts free from any brokerage, but I wanted something that I could run offline and where I could add lots of bells and whistles because I was convinced that the only way to improve my Swap system during sideways or volatile markets was to get involved in intra-day charting. After spending a lot of time with that and checking out a lot of other things I decided that intra-day data is pretty much worthless because it is so fast that it can do things for you but it can just as easily do things to you, and I don't mean that in the positive sense -- if you are going to be in a train wreck, it's better to be in a slow train wreck than in a fast train wreck. It's easier to survive a slow train wreck. The bottom line is that after trying everything I could think of, nothing intra-day helped the Swap system; but I did find some inter-day things that helped a lot.
So I'll repeat myself: it's not the intra-day activity that's so important unless you are a day trader; instead, it's the inter-day trading that is important, and that is reflected in daily candlestick patterns. In fact, I've been thinking for a while that perhaps there should be such a thing as a 2-day candle, and that there would be one for every day. This would mean that candles account for two days and also overlap. This is not an entirely new concept -- the calculation of Average True Range (ATR), for instance, is a 2-day calculation. Notice the word 'True' in the name of the indicator. It's an attempt to account for 'overnight' psychology and account for gaps.
Why do I bring all this up? Because my opinion (which has changed over the last few years) is that long-term traders don't need intra-day charts, and because there are lots of off-line end-of-day charting programs that are either available for free, or cost very little to purchase.
