The setup

Before I wrote the first post I'd already done some hunting and found some good free tools, I'd also simultaneously made the decision to purchase my first stock of the adventure and write the blog.  Writing the post took significantly longer.  Without further ado, for right now this is my setup of free tools.  I'm hesitant to make the details of my broker public, and I don't use any of their tools.

Tools

I use Google finance to manage my positions and watch lists.  I manually input my transactions into the tool and use it to watch price movement intra-day.  I'm not day trading, I just like seeing things shape up throughout the day instead of waiting until the end of the day.  I find their interface cleaner than anything my broker gives me.  As a final pro for Google they post related news right alongside my positions in my watch list.  While I'll generally try to avoid buying into a company that has an upcoming news release, I might try to use it to my advantage at some point and I'd like to at least be aware.  Also it's good to see how other analysis firms are evaluating a stock since the major players usually cause trends based solely on their opinions.

For charting I use either FreeStockCharts.com or StockCharts.com.  They're such creative names, aren't they?  Generally FreeStockCharts is a better package, an account is free and allows you to save preferences.  Of course they're constantly trying to upsell you, but I can't really fault them for that.  The only downside is that the silverlight app is so data heavy and requires communication above and beyond what HTTP provides I can't use it at my office.  However I can save my technicals, interact with the chart in real-time, create watch lists, and even run limited scans.
Stockcharts.com is a great site, offering very attractive free charts.  If I want to investigate something while at work I go here.  Unfortunately the charts for free users are static and the technicals have to be re-set each visit.  Stock charts also has something called a "Market Carpet" which I use to find stocks based on their performance relatively to the S&P 500.

Technical Analysis

I use candlestick charts.  When I started looking online for tips and advice most of the advice that was easy to understand and made a lot of sense was given through analysis of candlesticks and their signals.  In addition, they look cool.  I overlay several Moving Averages to my charts:

• A Simple MA with a period of 10
• A Simple MA with a period of 200
• An Exponential MA with a period of 30 

I also place a Simple MA with a period of 50 over the volume chart.

It looks like this, on FSC: