So I found this site http://www.hftalert.com/hft-alert.html It claims to show you what the htf players are doing. Anyone use it or familiar with it?
checked the website. what a load of shitshow these guys have organized. minimum subscription is 25 bucks a month. BS - if the product really works, minimum subscription charge should be 25k a month and product should be targetted to hfs not retail joeblow. Think about the concept - use hft activity to trade stocks ....Wow....hft reaction times is in millisecond to microsecond. And a discretionary trader is supposed to look at the analysis and trade on that. Still, I am sure a lot of suckers would get sucked in. Thanks for bringing this crap in front of the ET crowd.
The site claims that hft programs often fire off together and in bursts; the real catalyst behind significant moves.
It's not HFT programs. It's buy/sell accumulation distribution alogo's... And, yes... I have found two different ways to detect them. It's quite stupidly simple actually. You just need to take a very close look at $Tick data and Bid/Ask volume ratios... I am against it though. You shouldn't be trading off what others are doing. You should understand why they made their decision in the first place... Or why they programmed their alogos to make the decisions the way they are... Any big players daytrading stocks are not going to be manually entering orders...
OK Since htf alert has been soundly rejected by all and sundry, how about this one http://sceeto.com/
I've used the $25 version for some time now. Easily worth the money. They use a Nanex feed to find quote bursts throughout the market and relay that to you. If you are an index trader it would be a helpful tool because you see the program trades hit the market, and you can even see which stocks were heavily traded during the program. It's also useful for finding news stocks. He should be charging 10x, not sure why he's priced it that way.
You are a highly successful and experienced equities trader, so if you find it highly useful, I will withdraw my negative comment. Can you write in detail, how you find this track of activity helpful in your trading, especially in the context of trading ES? Also, you can see burst of activity in different stocks, but can't you get the same information using a scanner? Thanks.
Let's say the market is strong and you are watching for a big $tick reading to short. You get a 1000 $tick, but the hft shows only 250 stocks in the buy program. Not great. Then the market moves higher again and you get a 1200 $tick with 500 stocks included...a way better signal to short. Could you just use $tick? Yeah, but this is a confirmation tool. (This practically played out right when I was typing so I took a screenshot). Like I mentioned you can also see which stocks were heavily traded on the program. Was it broad based like SPY, IWM, VXX? Or was it something else like XHB or UNG? I attached a pic of how I have it set up to trade SPY for reference. In this case the first two spikes were little programs, so I only took a little short. The third was much bigger so I doubled. Immediate rejection bar down for a cover. Regarding news stocks, this will pick up a blast of quotes faster than a scanner. My only complaint is they don't hotlink to Esignal yet, although supposedly it's in the works.