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Whenever a stock or futures trade is made, it has to be reported to the exchange at which the stock or futures contract is listed. For example, a trade in Microsoft (MSFT) executed on the Instinet ECN has to be reported to Nasdaq. The exchange compiles this data as the Time & Sales for this particular stock.
 Time & Sales Data
This Time & Sales data is simultaneously distributed to
various data vendors like S&P Comstock, Reuters & Bloomberg who in turn
re-sell this data to various other parties like brokers, money managers, other
3rd party resellers like eSignal and individual traders and investors. Raw
financial data by itself is not particularly user-friendly except to the rare
breed of traders who call themselves tape-readers. For the majority of other
traders and investors, specialized front-end charting software are available to
chart this data and present it in such a way as to be useful.
Trading Charting Software
Various charting software and data packages are available and they are put
together differently to suit the individual needs of the various players. It is
therefore imperative to know what is available to provide a better chance
of finding a suitable charting software and data vendor for your needs. In the
early days of online trading, charting software and datafeeds were offered as
separate bundles for e.g. excellent standalone charting programs like
Metastock, Tradestation and Supercharts were sold separately from the datafeed
provided by Reuters. The current trend is however towards complete charting
software and data solutions like what eSignal and QCharts offer.
If you are a casual investor and you have very minimal charting and data
needs, you can actually obtain free finance and charting services from Yahoo Finance, StockCharts.com or ADVFN, to make your trade decisions. The drawbacks to these free services are that they normally are delayed by at least 15 minutes and the user has limited or no flexibility in performing various technical studies with the data.
Data for Technical Analysis
 On the other hand, there are some very sophisticated charting
software and data packages that allow you to present the data in a myriad of
ways so as to enable you to try to understand a trading instrument's behaviour.
Generally, trading data consists of the basic components i.e. Date, Time, Open,
High, Low, Close, Volume and Open Interest. With these basic data, a trader can
perform basic technical analysis like Candlesticks, Stochastics and MACD.
Advanced analytics like Elliot Wave analysis can also be performed if the trader
prefers.
The charting software and data are also generally packaged as End-of-Day,
Real-Time and Delayed trading solutions. The subsequent articles on Realtime Charting and data and End-of-Day Charting and data will provide a more in-depth description of what these packages offer.
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