I started in 1991 with Quick and Riley phone call buy and sell. My dad was a computer analyst and i had bought a IBM style PC. Believe it or not ..at that time there was a wall street data feed from cable tv that morningstar sold to the cable providers. It may have been via early CNBC ticker feeds. But I was able to subscribe to the service called QuoTrek wallstreet quotes/graphs. There was also a Signal and EOD quote service. You could get real-time or 15 minute delayed. It was from Data Broadcast Corp San Mateo, CA and it came with a coaxial PC card which I plugged into the 8086 PC (not sure if they had a modem service). Of course I bought stock...but I also learned to daytrade OEX options. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index was another great option to trade back then. There was also a Japan Index that people were trading puts on. These were great early trading days. Strangely ..I was buying Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Novell. Things have come full circle. I should dig up some of my paper trade confirmations from Quick and Riley and scan them into Flickr and post the pics here.
That's one of the reasons I haven't taken up cryptocurrencies so far. LOL. Nice to have the weekend completely off. I mostly day trade, so I can usually disconnect during the night, though. It's perfectly possible to be an RTH only trader. Even when I'm doing the occasional swing trade on a stock it's hard to keep my mind off it even if it's well in the money.
Markets need to be open 24 hrs 7 days a week...money doesn't sleep so why should wallstreet. ..its coming. I have done a handful of trading overnight. It actually is very worth it.
Wow, you and I started at about the same time. True, there were Quotron and MetaStock, but very expensive for retail traders.
yea..metastock was a golden standard back then. I had that as a seperate software package and did evening graph analysis. My metastock was just software..there was no live data feed that I could afford. Signal stock/bond live data software had a basic 15 minute delay graphing ability which was amazing as a beginner. Quotrek was a hand held 15 minute delay stock prices unit..it looked like a Blackberry. I couldnt afford that one either. I just used Signal and I think a wall street journal/MSM feed also for breaking market news. I used the book Technical Analysis of the Futures Markets-- by John Murphy as a learning tool...although I did the TA mostly on stocks.
See how 99% of the gains or losses when ever there is any are happening well before market opens. .nvda closed around 887, before the markers even go ding ding ding it's up 2%. I have been seeing this over and over and over again. Then all the fools come in buying at open giving the overnight crew who bought it even more gains. Rinse and repeat. .. In an up market it's the same movement day in and out. Last night futures dipped, that could have been a buying opportunity for anyone looking to go long as today before the markets are open futures are once again green. So yes bring 24 7 trading and let the games begin. Even 24/5. Makes zero sense to close a market when electronic trading and of course AI run the markets. Let ai handle all like they are going to in a year or 2. Isn't this where it's headed anyway....
All markets should be 24/7. Risk management, THE most important factor of trading success goes out the window when you are left unprotected during the most crucial time of the market. Hmmm almost seems like the game is rigged...it's like making a law that says you can only where your seatbelt between 930am-4pm.
Me and my friend used to trade OEX options with real-time Signal data. DBC had a monopoly until BMI came along with their data feed over cable. It was way faster than DBC. I used to use Tradestation with BMI but without multicore processing you couldn't really collect tick data for more than 100 or so symbols. My commodity trader friend used Reuters Satellite. It was super fast plus you got all the real time news from Reuters. I remember he made a fortune trading in Soybean futures. He used his pyramiding technique of adding more and more contracts when it went up. Dangerous strategy but walked away with like $800K in 1995. His day job was systems analyst for Intel.