Investment Tools
Software programs designed to support decision process on multiple levels. Unlike analysts, investment tools are completely unemotional and objective, which allows for diversification between these two sources of signals. Such diversification can substantially lower the risk (variability) without compromising profitability. In fact, if tools are accurate, investor's and trader's profitability can increase.
Financial tools are anything from calculators based on Black-Scholes options pricing model to statistic modeling platforms utilizing sophisticated and accurate algorithms able to compute massive amounts of data (imagine analyzing 30 years of data and suddenly changing your mind about your initial assumption... it would be a painful waste... unless you can recalculate it effortlessly!) Online Financial tools often have the ability to use both, real-time and historical financial data from multiple markets simultaneously. They are often accompanied with quick-start guides and video tutorials which make practicing and implementing them into an investor's strategy a simple task.
As a financial investor you should be able to properly assess multiple aspects of a given transaction, whether it is the risk/reward ratio, mining company performance, precious metals prices or the amount of capital you should use to maximize your profits from stocks, options or futures trades.
Financial tools can be flexible when properly designed, allowing different investors and traders to benefit from them. This universal characteristic can be obtained by letting an investor choose from multiple combinations of the time horizon (focusing on long-term profitability or short-term returns), risk tolerance (risk management according to your preferences and actual situation), underlying commodity price and other preferences (leverage, amount of initial capital, position size, option pricing). This makes financial tools highly customizable (you can even use the same tool as your neighbor, but after indicating your preferences you will end up with tailored software).
Tools and Analysts
As a precious metals investor or even a person interested in the sector you surely appreciate the fact that analysts play an extremely important role in making or supporting investment decisions. You yourself are an analyst, so you know how important your job is. However, as an analyst you should be also aware of a possibility to improve your decision making process thanks to the use of investment tools.
Sometimes it just happens that you have an idea on how the market works in certain situations but you are not quite sure if your idea really works. In other situations you know that some phenomena occur on the market but you do not know their magnitude. In both of these cases investment tools may be of help to you. They may help you put concrete numbers to the actions on the market.
For example, you might have the idea that derivatives influence the prices of gold and silver. But when exactly and to what extent? You cannot answer such question precisely of the top of your head. That is when investment tools come in. They give you a specific answer, an answer based on data and not on sentiment. Because of that investment tools have an important upside of being objective.
So even if you rely on the opinions of analysts who do not make many mistakes it is still possible that those analysts are all under the influence of emotions and that their views might be biased. That implies the need to resort to investment tools in order to diminish the risk of being deceived by false sentiment.