One of the nice things about NTKN is that they have a correspondent at the location of some of the releases and you can hear the countdown by the govt official to the number release live. I don't know if it gets faster than that other than the delay between his cell phone to the soundboard to the broadcast. I think this is NTKN's strongest feature. They also do regular market sweeps for Forex, interest rates and other futures. They have an applet in development which I have tested which allows one to listen to both their equities and futures feeds at the same time at different volumes. This hasn't been full released yet, but it looks good. I can't speak for the equities side, I don't use it.
I agree with you. I have found that there are periods of time were one service is faster than the others. Just depends. I think Reuters is tip/top from my experience. MNI was breaking stuff faster than anyone for a while. http://www.economeister.com/index.jsp You can subscribe on the web for a free trial. Futurestrader71, Thanks for the link. I am going to check out these guys. Seems like a good deal for an all around news service. Do they cover commodities like gold, oil etc? I like the idea of having someone shout the news at me.
MNI and Reuters are the best for forex. Try MNI's free forex trial on their website. I posted the link right above. They are as good as anyone.
I don't know how it works in the US but in the UK all the news agencies are let into a room 30 minutes before the figures are due for release. They are then given the figures and have half an hour to prepare their release and commentaries etc. When it gets to the allotted time then they can press send.
Yes, they call gold, silver and platinum prices out in their market sweep if something significant happens. They always call out the closing prices for those products. They will call out crude on new highs and lows, but since they are a news service there is a delay of around 30 seconds after it happens. For $100 per month to have someone call out the news, I don't think it can be beat. Do a 14-day trial and see. There are some areas of improvement and they are constantly working on that. News is key for scalping and I trust these guys. The downside is that they sometimes miss a big story, but so did TTN and others.
Not sure, but I can hear the countdown and then the reporter reads the results. Immediately after that, you get the regular announcer who reiterates and tells you how that compares to the expected figure. Also, the announcer will update you on the figures as the time draws nearer so it is hard to not be aware of a number coming out. I suspect that the same thing happens in the US where the number is released to the press and then they count down to the time it can be broadcast. The correspondent at the govt location says a lot and too fast to imagine that he just got the release and has scanned in 1/2 sec.
Any suggestions on a news service for equities that is not audio-based? I would like to be able to type in a stock symbol and get the most up-to-date news on that stock. Currently use flyonthewall but need something faster but less expensive than Bloomberg. Any suggestions would be appreciated.