I would like trader's opinions on the value, if any, in trading rooms and has it helped or hurt your trading. I'm not talking about following someone elses picks and expecting success. I am think more in terms of being in a room that has the same general trading philosophy and utilizing the room for alerts on stocks, another set of eyes if you will. Or do these call outs take you off your game and have you in stocks you would not have traded and it works against you?
Most chat rooms are free and you can easily find out yourself that answer in comparison to the answer of someone else that was looking for something else. Free chat rooms on the FinancialChat and Othernet servers of IRC. In addition, free chat rooms at discussion forums. I won't recommend any specific chat room because you should try them your self via your own research. Regardless, the only way you're going to find like minded traders is to form your own free chat room...there are many free resources out there for such and you can then determine if being in a chat room full of like minded trading philosophy is useful or not. Yet, you said something odd...if you're in a trading room full of folks with the same trading philosophy...why would you be in stocks that you would not have traded considering they are stocks being traded by everyone else in the room via the same trading philosophy
Are you addressing physical or virtual ? There are virtual trading rooms and forums. I offer the following because it worked well for us way back then, and the experience may provoke something greater. Not the picture of what you have in mind, and certainly not quite the real time you are looking for, and perhaps not the excitement you are looking for. But out of this, can grow something more to your liking. Something YOU can customize. Eventually, it may grow into a physical trading room: next paragraph. You start it. I did. It was years ago and primitive and did not have the features I referred to (above), but we all liked it for what it did for us. It was a proxy for being in the same room with each other. We started with 7 of us that actually had met each other in training with a much larger group. We traded together in All Tech day trading. (We were Harvey Houtkins SOES BANDITS !) We grew to around a dozen over a number of months, and grew more after I had to leave it. The sustainability of membership and growth was testimony that it worked for what it was and traders found good in it. We didn't have a web site or message board. We considered IM, but in the end, I volunteered to initiate it. It was Google documents. Eventually ( I was not close to this nor know the details), geography for some worked, and they got together in some sort of room to trade. But even there, many of them kept up with Google documents and the many using it. They liked it, I'm sure, because of many reasons. Go to google and see its "documents'" feature if you are not familiar with it. There are probably other such things available and maybe better these days. We customized our own protocol for our own needs. We also had regularly scheduled post trading conference calls where good ideas came up for tweaking our use of the google document. (There are a variety of services for conference calls these days.) I filtered new membership and was bouncer and general housekeeper. There was a second person to stand in for me when I was not there occasionally for days. It did not have the spontaneity of personal presence, because it required typing and posting (we didn't mark down for spelling). We already knew, sort of, what each other's style was and what they were doing....So we could understand a post within the context of what we knew about that trader.) Posts were brief during trading hours. It was available 24 hours, but very active during trading hours. Traders found commonality with other traders in specialized areas, and started niche Documents, but kept up with the general Document where all traders had a hand in. Posts would generate an alert (email) that a post had been made. So in an awkward way, it was like IM, but the document was there for all traders to see right away or later, or to study later and call each other during or after trading session. We discussed having occasional get togethers, but it never materialized. (Some of few numbers may have done so.) Everyone had to contribute or be dismissed. I am only describing a little of the dynamics and features and what went on. As I said, I'm sure there may be something else available now. It is a bit thinking out of the box, but you can create something like this and may find after comradery is established and geography works, you can get together in a common place for trading if resources are there. There certainly has been for a long time, virtual trading rooms on the web, but you can't customize them for perhaps what you would like to have. And I suspect fees involved. Good Luck !
Thank you for sharing your experience. Maybe someone can recommned a physical trading room in Montreal (Canada) or give some link to virtual one? Again thank you.
In any trading room (I have been in dozens over the years), there are a few who know what they are doing and the rest know nothing or create noise. A trading room is good for sharing ideas, but you have to consider the source of the idea and be able to make a judgement on your own. There are only so many charts you can watch on your own, so many timeframes etc. In that respect it can be helpful to point out opportunities you might otherwise miss. It will take a bit of time in any active chat room to determine who actually knows what they are doing, who is a pumper and who the idiots are. There is also a lot of indirect scamming to try to appear as a brilliant trader. Posting 10 or 15 orders in a day that they say they are taking and then only posting the exits (later in the day or the next day) on the profitable ones and just ignoring the ones that do not work. Additionally these types of people always post the gains with their trades ("Out IBM 185.15 + 3.35). To those who do not pay much attention, these idiots appear to know what they are doing when in reality know nothing.