Latency arb is huge for these guys, and often results in turning points in the market in my opinion. I suggest reading Broken Markets.
Getting back to the HFT alert program, can anyone highlight specific setups or instances where it improved your trading?
Just going to post this here as something interesting. The biggest hft of the day just happened. You can see the stocks they traded in this sub-second program. We'll just have to wait and see if it means anything in the longer time frame. No position.
Fwiw that SPY trade was an intermarket sweep BUY that swept 3 levels for appx 100k shares (.88-.90). He quickly regretted that fill. It ended up being a good sell signal. Without the hft software you would have no idea that this is going on behind the scenes. Whether it would help your style of trading...who knows.
If your strategy includes taking the other side of big cash buy programs then you would have shorted. Otherwise, you wouldn't care...it's just information.
To elaborate on that - can you see just quotes or can you see offers and bids broken down? I assume whenever there is an imbalance the algos would be quoting and trading so there would be a spike. Whether it is something as large as a Russell rebalance or as small as a single investor buying 100K shares of SPY it still creates an imbalance which is what most of these guys are looking for. Would be interested to know if you could see the bids vs. offers quote ratios or if it's just a quote volume spike. If just a quote volume spike that'a a great tool for a manual trader... if it breaks down bids vs. offers I can see an edge there in the automated space. How delayed do they deliver this to you?
I can only see how many orders, and how many trades executed during that second. No bid/ask. The software is real-time. I never tried to ping for ms test though if that's what you're asking. For someone with programming experience and a nanex feed you could recreate the program with much more order detail, and the ability to autotrade it.
If you look back at 13:58, you'll see a decent spike without any following spikes. According to hft alert site, a lack of follow through often reverses price, which is exactly what happened.