Timothy Charles Slater, known as "Tim", is an American entrepreneur and trader who founded CompuTrac, the first software program to draw commodity graphs and technical market indicators on a personal computer, in 1978.

After graduating from Cornell University in 1956, and completing his ROTC commitment, Slater settled in Atlanta, Georgia he was hired by a division of Textron to sell polyethylene products in five southeastern states.

Subsequently, Slater began publishing a weekly newsletter on Fridays called, “Kaf-Trac” which focused on gold mining stock and the spot and futures market.

The CompuTrac program began its early development in 1977 when Slater realized that the Apple II computer, could read large amounts of data, calculate the technical indicators and display graphics on its 10-inch monochrome green screen.

However, with no programming experience, Slater was led to the computer science department at Loyola University of New Orleans and met Professor James Schmit.

The TAG events were instrumental in helping to educate individual and institutional traders to the advances of technical analysis and continue to increase sales of the CompuTrac software.

[5] In June 1986 CompuTrac launched the "Teletrac" charting and analysis system which operated using real-time data and used a proprietary hardware platform designed by Schmit and his engineering group.

Leverage Telerate's large domestic and international institutional subscriber base, the product covered, charting for commodities, indices, the spot foreign exchange and fixed income markets.

Teletrac offered 32 technical analysis indicators, intra-day charting time frames of 5 minute, hourly, daily, weekly and monthly and the ability to perform algorithmic system testing.

[6] In order to grow the company further and maximize the success of Teletrac, Slater knew that real-time data would be required to market the software to financial institutions.

After declining to sell CompuTrac to Reuters, Slater approached Telerate, a real-time financial information company that was affiliated with Cantor-Fitzgerald, a primary U.S. Treasuries brokerage firm.

[8] Slater was asked to remain with Dow Jones Telerate and continue his leadership with the TAG events which was growing into larger, multi-stream conferences in the United States, Europe and Asia.

In 1937, Louis Slater accepted a job as Sales Manager for the Southern Region with the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills and moved the family to New Orleans, Louisiana from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.