friva

sure, "assume nothing" is what I live by

thank u joshdance, that's a 6,5 rows statement + 3,5 rows of questions that I was never able to answer in a systematic way, at least when it comes to short term market action. Sure if you know how much money the bulls want to spend buying a stock and how much stock the bears are willing to sell in a unit of time you can tell how much the stock will move and in what direction over that time span. That you can try to do if you have enough good friends seeing brokers order flow. Checking volume exchanged won't help much, though. Market Depth Analysis, strangely enough, I find tends to work the opposite way you would expect, at least for DAX and FTSEMIB futures. Like a friend puts it: "if the tossers really want to sell they serve, not show offer". That is a way to "read volume" but it is of limited help, I found. I think one can devise a theory of how volume patterns are a reflection of changing moods, ie of the pace at which bulls change their bullishness relative to how bears change their bearishness, but I do not know how to do that in a workable way, at least for the timespans I am interested in, which most people would find very short. However I guess volume analysis might be more relevant in the medium to long term, meaning weeks or months. The secret is still a secret, I am afraid

Whatever people find useful it is useful for them and I respect that. Personally I never found anything in volume analysis that proved reliable in the long haul. I sure felt excited at times for the like of OBV and other volume related indicators/techniques, however they never proved really reliable in my experience. Money in is always equal to money out at all times in all markets. Anybody out there can make a case for volume analysis using a ten rows statement ? If there is really something true to volume analysis you do not need more than that to explain. best F

Tradewinds, can u pls clarify ? Are you suggesting to use eg the following syntax: tracert-d traderlsaboratory.com ?

also to get to the MS Dos prompt: click start click run type: cmd return

Tradewins, I bet somebody did already. I myself am serirously considering moving to get a better internet connection for trading. Net Index by Ookla says that if I move to a small city 15 km north east the average connection speed there is 4x what I have now.

thank u Tams. I'll read that

thank you Negotiator. Where I can find more about how the set up of my hardware influences lag/latency ? How do I check how good my ISP's hardware is when it comes to lag/latency ?

wrbtrader, it's a connection test of the nearest server my ISP has to me

Hi, what is the minimum internet connection speed you think you need for your trading, and what is your trading style ? I get: ping: 42ms download: 2.59 Mbps upload: 6.86 Mbps (http://www.speedtest.net) and I am comfortable with this I trade discretionary, index futures and stocks. I normally enter a position with limit orders and make less than 20 trades per day. What about you ? FR

hi vienna, good question. I think a FTT has more than 50-50 chances to come. Even a R President in the US might want this. Sarkozy and Merkel are both right wing after all (or so their label reads). The UK said they won't go for it unless the tax is globally charged. That is not a NO. Italy almost passed a 0,15% stamp duty tax on equity/ETF/index futures trading earlier this summer. The Belgian Parliament already approved a FTT, if I remember well 3 years ago, that was meant to automatically become effective as soon a FTT was "globally" approved. I am sure many other countries are ready to join: you can always count on politicians being even impatient to do stupid things. So I think it's unwise not to get prepared. If a FTT is passed I guess one can: 1) trade Contract For Differences or Spread Betting; 2) trade where replica contracts will be launched. I know nothing about (1) and on TL I found close to nothing. Can anybody recommend: a) the best CFD broker in his/her view ? b) any other valuable source of info on CFDs (eg: reliable historical data on the width of bid/ask spreads) ? When it comes to (2) it's almost certain that some country will reject a FTT. Some of them (Dubai?) will probably launch replica futures contracts. Having said that tax payers might be asked to pay a FTT to their tax authorities irrespective of where the trades are effected. If you are happy to report fine, but if you are not it is good if the broker you use manages accounts/servers outside of where you pay taxes. Eg: IB holds european customers money in London. As far as I know it executes orders via its servers in Switzerland. This means that all non-British (and non-Swiss) customers can feel almost 100% safe that IB will not be asked to report their trades to the relevant tax authorities or whether they moved funds offshore. Any other idea ? Best F

Nobody is going histerical with speculators in Italy ... yet. Consob, the italian stock market watchdog, even acknowledged that most of the stock selling is genuine and is not short selling. Politicians just do what most humans do, ie blame others.

bonchi07, it does look helpful, thank u

hi MMS, I am wondering about making the switch for two reasons: a) I wish to spend more time out of town and I find it more practical to have one main machine and two sets of monitors rather than 2 mon-sets + 2 desktops. b) I have the impression laptops are evolving faster than desktops so better get used to the former not to "lose out" in the future. I may be wrong, of course thank u for ur comment best F

hi everybody, my ideal trading setup has been so far a desktop with four screens and I am now curious about using a laptop instead. Can anybody share his/her experience trading with a laptop and multiple screens and what hardware layout you chose ? Has anybody had any experience with the layouts described on BannRonn.com (see: "Dual or Multi-Monitor Laptop for Stock Trading" in the site) ? thank you F

hi Gabe, it does make sense, it is also a useful belief to hold. Most people might not understand what u mean and might laugh when u say that. Do you care ?

thank u sr100m. I understand you do not download prices in Excel any more. May I ask what replaced Excel in ur trading setup ? best F

At first sight XLQ looks pretty user-friendly. They say: "if u can use Excel you know how to use XLQ". On the QuoteLink site I did not find comparable attempts to make it sound "easy": it might be the target users whit stronger coding capabilities. XLQ can be used through VBA, so it can be automatically activated by an Excel routine. The program provides a list of functions that can be run in Excel. Some of these return fundamental data like "Dividend Pay date" or "Institutional %". The functions offered in the lite version are in black font, the ones added on in the full version are in blue (scroll down in "XLQ Overview"). XLQ comes at USD 139/year in its full version (including xlqCompanion: an application that gives alerts and calculates trailing stops) and USD 84/year in its lite version. QuoteLink I understand charges CHF 120/years for "quotes only" and CHF 300 for "professional". It is unclear to me what is the difference between the two,

sr100m, thank you for your suggestion. If you tried both QuoteLink and XLQ can you tell more aboute their relative strength/weaknesses ? best F

Is a speculator's role in society to give away "ticks" for free ? Maybe yes. Say u urgently need 8k for something as noble as paying for ur kid's medical bill and u happen to have that sum invested in a stock. If there is a speculator around u might get EUR 8010 instead of EUR 7990 for ur line of shares. In other words u get more for what u sell. If u are instead in a buying mood a speculator might help u pay less for what u buy. That's not so usual. Ur friendly shopkeeper around the corner charges u more, not less, to spare u the nuisance to drive to the hypermarket.

I ve seen a lot of incompetent people do well in life because they were either fun to be with or good looking/sexually available or charming or willing to do whatever they were told to do, even when unethical. As all of that counts nothing when "speculating" it might well be that a "speculator" does a more honest job than most (does not of course apply for trading on inside information or else)

hi Siuya, thank u for ur comments and for the dividend adjustment issue. Best F

hi TAMS, good to know about IB's competitive pricing for live data. I understand they charge EUR 56/month for DAX stocks. This is not directly comparable to e-signal's (USD 246/month including taxes for all german stocks) but it seems quite low. For live prices I understand IB charges EUR 25/month for Level 1 DAX future prices, EUR 15/month for level 1 FTSE-MIB futures prices. Cooms are low on futures: DAX and FTSE-MIB futures (EUR 1.41-2.00 / leg) compared to local brokers (EUR 3-10/leg). Comms for stock trading are relatively high (avrg 10bips compared to locals charging as low as EUR 5 per trade). thank u F

Hi everybody, I am making a little investigation on how to best pull market data for stocks and index futures into Excel, with an eye on minimising costs of course. I have a special interest on German and Italian stocks and futures (eg DAX, FTSE-MIB) but I care for shares/futures in general. I want to be able do two things: A) download up to 12 months of High-Low-Last prices on an excel worksheet. B) have the corresponding live quote on another worksheet. To clarify what I mean I enclose a zipped excel file. Sheet "Data" and "Data1" give u an idea on how dowload A should look like. On sheet "Data" u can see Last daily prices while on "Data1" u can see High-Low-Last prices for one minute time intervals. Sheet "Last" gives u have an idea of how download B looks like (Last daily prices = live quotes). I am fine updating the prices on the sheet by pressing a "refresh" button. I gathered some info about vendors. See below, but double check with them if u need to be sure. Pls share any suggestion or experience about downloading market data into excel. Best F CHECKED: *E-SIGNAL: can download quotes for italian and german stocks/futures for USD 249/month (including 20% tax and exchange fees). 12 months in advance yield some discount. It's USD 2779/year for 12 months (includes tax and exch fees). Billing is direct to customer, no way to get the service through a broker that then rebate to E-signal some of the comms. *IQ-FEED: they do not offer market data from european exchanges. Ref USA they charge USD 63/month without exchange fees to download raw prices for up to 500 US securities (unclear if tax is iuncluded). To download into Excel one can use software DTNIQ that comes at an additional USD 40/month. Also sofware Qcollector and Quotecore can be used to download into excel. Links to the software vendor can be found on IQ-Feed website. *KINETICK-NINJA: I understand one can NOT download into Excel. They offer european market data only if one funds a IB account. NOT CHECKED YET *CQG: I have heard it is very good stuff, but haven't checked yet with them. Do you know if I can download market data into Excel ? Any idea of the costs ? *INTERACTIVE BROKERS: can I download market data into Excel ? costs ? *BARCHART.COM: download into Excel ? costs ? *RANORDER: download into Excel ? costs ? *TRADEBOLT: download into Excel ? costs ? OTHERS ? *DIRECT PURCHASE FROM THE EXCHANGE: anybody managed to download market data into excel directly from the relevant exchanges ?

thank you, I'll contact u when ready to test