What's the best yet not crazy expensive news service available. I care more about when economic data or Greenspan etal is on the tape then silly corporate P.R. stuff. Also if you have an S&P squawk box service will any of those guys yell out "Fed eases 25 basis points" as the market rallies 50 handles.
Dow Jones, Bloomberg, and Reuters are the 3 big ones, afaik. They are, for most people, "crazy expensive." I had the Dow feed for a while in RealTick It was a full-time job to read all the headlines going across it. It was nice to get Fed and economic numbers so quickly, as you mention. When CNBC reads an economic number, they usually read it off the Dow news wire. Pricing for the Dow news varies by broker. It all depends on what the broker can negotiate. If feasible, if you are close with your broker and they do not offer DJ, maybe you could get them to BS DJ into a free trial. (It worked for me) Any other news services, the cheap ones, are going to be delayed - pretty worthless, imo. The 2 squawk boxes that I have used are not reliable for news. When a number comes out, the market is rocking and the "squawker" is devoting all of his attention to keeping up with the current bid and offer. Gee, that "free e-book" thread disappeared pretty quickly, didn't it?
Scalpers with newsfeeds buy on the news and sell into any action created by briefings releases, which is always at least several min. later. Still, it is a useful service for the price imo.
What we hear on squwak boxes is enough to know something is happening. The roar of the crowd of traders goes from maybe 20 to 50 traders trading to over 500 with a lot of paper coming in. WE ARE TALKING LOUD AS YOU CAN IMAGINE. a huge line starts than on our charts a few seconds later. When the crowd is that loud a smart trader knows something is going on. I teach traders who trade in my office what to listen for and how to react to the gifts. Those are the key times to move on something Robert Tharp