Dustin, I see from your earlier post in this thread that you've used them for around 9 months now and that you are (presumably still) primarily a stock trader of S&P500 or Nasdaq100 stocks (like myself). Thats a solid reommendation. Thanks. ======= protrader00, Do you know which one they use? I'm figuring that if it is useful once a day its well worth it for someone trading at home with no other traders around sharing info. I want to keep things fairly simple (thats why I'm only trading one stock) but I'm trying to find something that might clue me in to things like that crazy 11am (eastern time) futures spike right after I took a loss in a long position in IBM. It popped $1 in 2 minutes soon after I bailed as it broke under 95.50. Of course it may have been no help on that particular trade but at some point it could be helpful. I sometimes look at NYSE advancers and if its rising when futures are not it indicates that futures may be headfaking but my long entry wasn't optimal so I didn't want to risk it since my signals were not clear and my postion was a bit larger than I wanted to let wiggle. ======= Has anyone tried Xsquawk?
You want to concentrate on what the houses are doing, but also listen to see what the locals are doing. Some locals are big traders who the others will follow. Some will follow the houses and some work for the houses a bit I believe. It is nice to know when all the locals are caught long or short. If you are a scalper, you have to have audio feed to the pits because the big traders do and you need to be on a level playing field with them to stand a chance. A good squaker will lead your realtick minis, which is huge.
Dustin: âit can be extrememly useful...especially if you are a scalper...â As Iâm not much of a scalper I decided to stop listening. I found that when trading for longer swings it got in the way and became more of a distraction than a benefit. It was most useful to me at the open. Iâve not used a service for a very long time but for $100/month it certainly seems worth a try.
OK, well I guess I've at least narrowed it down to two services for starters. Both www.realtimefutures.com and http://los.net/ offer free trial periods of 2-3 days. Hopefully I can decide which I prefer in that period of time. Now I'm debating on whether or not to run the trial periods simultaneously. I wonder if it would drive me crazy to have them both running at the same time (on different machines). That way I could see if one has a slight jump on the other or reads the pit better. Hmmm...
I don't think I'd want both services running at once. Ben Lichtenstein on realtimefutures does at great job. If you are just starting a pit feed and you've become accustomed to just the sound of CNBC while trading, you'll find that he will at first sound like an autioneer, especially when prices start moving. It takes some getting used to. But once you start to get the feel of his pace and commentary, you'll appreciate all of the information that he's giving you. For myself, I'd prefer to focus on one at a time, so that I could get up to speed more quickly and make better use of the service. By the time you try the los.net or another service for 30 days, you'll not only be better prepared to compare the speed of the services, but you'll be a more critical listener to the quality of the commentator. Probably an overlap during the last days of your trial period would work the best for comparing speed. By the time your 2 months of trials are up, you should have a pretty good idea of how this helps your trading as well.
Maybe it's just me, but I listend to realtimefutures.com for about 10 minutes yesterday, and just couldn't stand it. DaveN is correct that he sounds like an auctioneer - in fact, at first I thought he was trying to do a Robin Williams impression (Goooooooooood morning, Vietnam!) Anyway I'll try again today. I actually find MarketSound to be more tolerable, although I never find it to be of much help.
I actually just cancelled last month since I haven't been scalping in this market. But in the future if I go back to that style I wouldn't hesitate to sign back up with realtimefutures.com
I just joined the realtimefutures trial and I really gotta say, since I'm german it's pretty hard to understand what this guy is saying =) Anyway I really don't understand how anyone can speak that fast, every day with almost no break... it's really amazing