Smartstock for Windows

India's stock market is growing into a global force, and investors and market watchers around the world follow it. Gyarsi Systems Network's Smartstock is the first software of its kind, a free investment-planning tool focused on opportunities in India. It can analyze investments, trends, and markets to help advise you in investing, growth, and new prospects in international business.

Smartstock requires the Microsoft .NET framework and an Internet connection for logging in to access Gyarsi's forums and to retrieve up-to-date financial information. It's got a fairly standard tabbed interface, with taskbar items for logging in, managing portfolios, equity, technical analysis, and backtesting. The Help button only leads to the developer's online forum, which we found disappointing. The program is balky and hangs a bit in its transition between views, and it occasionally displayed cryptic error messages, such as when we clicked Login to attempt to create an account. We received a message stating "Form that is not a top-level form cannot be displayed as a modal dialog box. Remove the form from any parent form before calling showDialog." When we clicked the Backtesting button, a dialog informed us that "A column named 'name' already belongs to this Data Table." However, the backtesting page did appear after we clicked OK. We also successfully created a new portfolio. This program's tools generally function as claimed, though it worked much better in Windows XP than in Windows 7, so there may be some bugs.

Smartstock is free, so it's worth taking a look at if you're interested in checking out Indian securities or just seeing how they perform. However, investors might want to look for a more robust platform. As a cutting-edge investment tool for a critical emerging market, it's not quite ready to go public.