www.ADVFN.com

When I brought up the homepage of Advanced Financial Network (www.advfn.com), it was evident that several features had been added to it since my last review in June 2003. I'll have to confess that it was very easy to get distracted by the large number of advertisements on the site, but once you get past that, you'll find the site does contain a vast amount of information.

The navigation bar along the top of the page is one indication of the various features available. I also noticed the five dropdown menus, and this was enough to get my attention. Once I logged in and installed the Java application, the fun started.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN

The first thing that popped up on my screen was a quote screen similar to the one in Figure 1. You have the flexibility to add stock symbols, create your own list of stocks (monitor), and edit the existing lists. From this screen you can move to one that displays small charts of all the symbols listed on the quote screen.

FIGURE 1: MONITOR. This screen allows you to monitor all the symbols you'd like to keep an eye on.


If you go back to the navigation bar along the top of the screen, your next option is Quote. Here you get detailed quotes for the symbol you entered, similar to what you would find in Yahoo! Finance. And yes, you can download historical prices. Then, of course, you can get charts, of which you have two options: static interactive Java charts or streaming interactive Java charts.

Not only that, there's an option to view a point & figure chart. One feature worth mentioning about this charting type is having the option of altering the settings, including box size and the number of reversals. One new feature that has been added is the chart grabber. This feature lets you take screenshots of charts and publish them on websites, message boards, and so forth.

An interesting feature added to the site is the list of trades (Figure 2). This is similar to a time & sales window. There's a buy indicator that is color-coded, making it easy to determine where the buying/selling pressure is. There's also a chart that is referred to as Meta Trades, which displays the trades and price changes per minute.

FIGURE 2: BUY INDICATOR. If you wish to know what the buying or selling pressure is of a particular security, it's very easy to determine whether the buyers are dominating or the sellers.


Added features include the ADVFN screener, which basically screens stocks. The screening is based only on fundamental data. I didn't see any technical criteria listed.

In addition, you get features that you usually find in financial market-related websites. These include news, fundamental data, Top 10 lists, alerts, portfolio creation, and forums. Level II quotes are available in the upgraded packages.

ADVFN now offers data from more than 40 exchanges. Registration to their services is free and this includes stock quotes, watchlists, charts, portfolio, financials, and news. There are various options when it comes to upgrading, and these include but are not limited to real-time streaming quotes and charts, NASDAQ TotalView, real-time Level I and Level II quotes from various exchanges such as the LSE, Euronext, and Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). You could also subscribe to their trading signal systems that provide buy/sell signals for NASDAQ and the eminis.

With global trading taking center stage in the life of a trader, the ability to access data from global exchanges is an advantage that shouldn't be ignored. And the price is right, at least for the basic service, and there's plenty there. In fact, an upgrade to the ADVFN Silver Package is only $5.00 per month with a free one-month trial. You do have to register in order to access the services, free or otherwise. But this gives you the opportunity to be part of the member forum, which from the looks of it is relatively active. One area that could prove helpful on the site would be to include an FAQ section or a summary of services available so that visitors can get an idea of what they will be getting before registering for the services.

-Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan, Editor


RELATED READING
Gopalakrishnan, Jayanthi [2003]. "www.ADVFN.com," Websites for Traders, Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES, Volume 21: June.

Homepage of www.advfn.com




 

www.TRADINGMARKETS.com
 

Very early in his book How Markets Really Work, author, trader, and TradingMarkets.com founder Larry Connors pays tribute to the writing of Michael Lewis. Lewis, author of Liar's Poker and Moneyball, is famous for having shown how the insiders of the investment banking world of Wall Street plied their trade in the booming 1980s, and how a crafty baseball owner reinvented the way talent was evaluated in Major League Baseball in the late 1990s.

What ties the worlds of Liar's Poker and Moneyball together are two themes. First, the books offered a rare glimpse into worlds that most of us only know through stock tables and box scores. Second, in both instances the institutions involved - Salomon Brothers and the Oakland Athletics, respectively - decided they needed to rewrite the rules of the game in order to compete with older, richer, or simply better established competitors.

FIGURE 1: THE HOME PAGE OF TRADINGMARKETS.com


In visiting TradingMarkets.com, it is readily apparent how both themes - the value of seeing the world from the view of those on the inside and the willingness to abandon conventional wisdom - have contributed to make this website one of the best resources on the Internet for stock, option, futures, and foreign exchange traders. Unlike many financial websites that use a mixture of journalists and money managers to discuss the financial news of the day, TradingMarkets.com has from the beginning focused on bringing everyday active traders into the world of real-world traders and money managers for whom trading the financial markets is their life's work.

THE MAKING OF TRADINGMARKETS.COM

As I mentioned at the outset, TradingMarkets.com was founded by author and trader Larry Connors, along with an all-star group of traders including Kevin Haggerty (who ran the Fidelity Capital Markets trading desk for seven years), former hedge fund manager Mark Boucher, and a host of other prominent investors, speculators, and money managers. From the beginning back in the late spring of 1999, the goal of TradingMarkets.com was clear. As TradingMarkets.com editor-in-chief Eddie Kwong told me in a recent telephone conversation, that goal was "to bring active traders and active investors real trading information from a unique perspective: people who really trade or manage money for a living."

It's a point worth underscoring. While there are ways to get information about the markets - be they stock, option, futures, or foreign exchange markets - and any number of smart people who have developed effective tools and systems to trade and invest in these markets, the real world of trading is about more than information and technique. A world of psychology and temperament must be included if we are to truly talk about what happens before, during, and after the buy or sell button is pushed. As Kwong put it, TradingMarkets writers are "not only teaching a strategy," they are "actually doing it":

Trading involves a lot more than just a methodology. You have to have the personality and mental strength to be able to execute in what can be a very emotional and chaotic environment. Not everybody can do it. There are a lot of people who are smart and can create good trading ideas. [With TradingMarkets.com] there's this added dimension [of traders] who actually use this particular strategy for a living.

In sum, Kwong says, "there are insights you can learn from real traders and money managers that you can't get anywhere else."

TALKING TRADING

Accessible through seven different tabs, the "departments" of TradingMarkets.com are easy to find and navigate. The website features a home section of mostly news and commentary from the website's roster of "top of the rotation" players like Gary Kaltbaum, Dave Floyd, Mark Boucher, Dave Landry, and Brett Steenbarger - many of whom have been interviewed by or contributed to Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES over the years. These names are just a sampling of the sort of talent TradingMarkets.com keeps on its roster.

The homepage also features a set of links to some of the other special features such as TradingMarkets University, Indicators, Breaking News, Quotes and Charts, Trader Blogs, and TradersWire. TradingMarkets University acts as a sort of clearinghouse for continued trader education by offering books, courses, software tools for traders, whole trading systems, and trading "colleges." The indicators link takes website visitors to a separate page that lists data on top stocks that may be in uptrends or downtrends - with a variety of more exacting subcriteria such as "Pullbacks from highs" and "Short windows candidates."

Many of the more sophisticated indicators and setups come directly from the ongoing work of TradingMarkets contributors themselves, including actionable buy and sell signals and methodologies like "trading with the generals." This page also provides data on markets and sectors including the top- and bottom-performing exchange-traded funds (ETFs) - again, with more exacting subcriteria. Even the much-maligned mutual fund world comes in from TradingMarkets.com;  the indicators page features data on the top- and worst-performing mutual funds as well.

TradingMarkets.com also provides a number of news/data features that are worth pointing out. The "Breaking News" tab opens up a page with business news headlines and news links that are sortable by way of a pulldown menu. The different types of headlines or news data that traders can sort by is impressive: revenue revisions, sector alerts, breaking news, reiterations, or initiations of analyst coverage, economic news, small stock news, analyst upgrades or downgrades, general market analysis (for example, new 52-week highs), European market news, dividend announcements, earnings estimate changes and revisions, stock alerts, Asian markets, top stories, and more. It is hard to imagine too many categories of information not covered by Trading Markets.com's Breaking News page.

The quotes and charts available through the Quotes and Charts tab are not overwhelming by the standards of a website devoted primarily to charting. On their own merits, however, TradingMarkets.com's charts and quotes are informative and easy to read. Powered by Quotemedia.com, this page includes quotes, Level II, options chains, news, Sec filings, and historical and streaming data, along with 52-week highs and lows, earnings per share, and price/earnings ratio, and dividend yield.

BLOGS AND THE WIRE

If there are two areas worth special attention at the TradingMarkets website, then the Trader Blogs would be one and Traders Wire would certainly be the other. Trader Blogs are an idea that is long overdue - even if some form of instantly updated trader logs have appeared on the occasional financial website. Trader Blogs are, like the website itself, diverse and cover a variety of trading topics from an almost dizzying array of perspectives (when was the last time you studied bullish Gartley potential reversal zones?). The homepage for TradingMarkets.com's Trader Blogs features a listing of available blogs on the left-hand side of the page, with entertaining and/or thought-provoking titles like "Almost Trading for a Living," "The Harmonic Trader," and "The Stock Bandit." The homepage includes a listing of the most popular blogs ("Insights"), the latest posts, an archive of past entries, and a search function to help readers explore the blog content more quickly and efficiently.

Divided into themed sections, the short-term trading blogs are the most numerous while the forex trading blog section could use some company. It is also true some of the blogs are updated and added to more regularly than others, just like the rest of the blogosphere. At the same time, it is hard not to believe that as more and more traders and speculators become aware of TradingMarkets' Trader Blogs, not only will new blogs be added, but some older blogs will grow.

In some ways, the biggest jewel in the TradingMarkets crown might be TradersWire, one of the website's features that, understandably, was not made available free of charge when Trading Markets.com opened itself up for the largely gratis enjoyment of traders, speculators, and investors worldwide. More than simply an interactive chat room, TradersWire is a true trader's daily companion, providing key technical, fundamental, and economic information along with specific alerts, complete trade suggestions, and trade management guidelines.

Starting one hour before the market opens, TradersWire provides traders with likely stock movers of the day as well as overnight market data from the foreign exchanges. Premarket action, pivot points from exchange floor traders, volatility bands, and other information that is especially vital as the market is opening is also a part of what TradersWire presents subscribers. As the markets get going, TradersWire reports action on sector strength and weakness as well as information on upcoming economic reports.

Not content to be merely a source of information, TradersWire is also a place for real trading decisions. TradersWire provides traders with specific buy and sell signals for stocks and exchange-traded funds based on many of the more common and effective setups. These trading signals tell traders whether to buy or sell, the asset to be traded, the order type (market, limit, and so on) that would be most appropriate for the given trade, the name of the particular setup generating the trading signal, the stop-loss level, and the current price.

It is most important to note that these signals are not just offered to traders with an attitude of "See you at the close!" Instead, TradersWire provides real trade management guidelines, letting traders know everything from when to take partial profits to whether to raise or lower stops. Intraday setup alerts keep traders appraised of new opportunities as they arise during the trading session, along with real-time alerts that keep traders informed about surges of program trading, big volume moves, and technical clues such as when stocks are approaching the sort of long-term major moving averages that are often watched by institutional money managers.

MADE FOR THE MARKETS

Other tabs take readers to sections of the website devoted to such fields of trading endeavor as daytrading, options, swing trading, foreign exchange trading, emini trading, and futures. While there are other websites that do similar news and commentary work, there are few that cover as many aspects of the trading world as does Trading Markets.com. Each tab sends the reader to a different slate of traders, analysts, and commentators who are specialists in that given field, be it forex, emini trading, or swing trading. Catch Michael Kestler talking about earnings plays on the daytrading tab, or Joe Corona discussing volatility trading during "Freakout Fridays" by way of the options tab. The variety of the coverage-and the ease with which a trader can focus in on just the sort of trading he or she is interested in-is impressive.

Each tab also features a small section to point traders in the direction of trade opportunities. For example, the options tab-in addition to commentary and analysis-includes a short list of TradingMarkets' "Top option indicators," such as "Most overpriced puts" and "Most underpriced calls." The swing trading tab provides commentary, analysis and "Top swing trading indicators" like "Pullbacks off highs" and "Stocks ready to surge."

The commentary from veteran traders and analysts is itself surrounded by small modules and tidbits like "Trading Markets 10 stocks you need to know for today" and "TradingMarkets 10 rules for successful trading" and "Most popular (trading) blogs." TradingMarkets' breaking market alerts border the homepage at the bottom. This feature is a searchable news service that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and refreshes on the minute with technical information (for example, "Allergan has dropped to a 10-week low") as well as fundamental information (as in, "Microsoft and Real Networks could declare truce in antitrust case").

Although already rich with content, TradingMarkets.com is in some ways a work in progress. Kwong reports that the website will soon begin providing subscription services in options, day- and swing trading, forex, and emini futures. In addition, TradingMarkets is developing new trading software that will provide traders with specific, short-term buy and sell signals. Also on the up and coming list is TradingMarkets Day Trading College, which will consist of live, one-day workshops for traders interested in learning how to effectively and profitably daytrade stocks.

One of the most remarkable aspects of TradingMarkets is that much of this content now available for free was once available only on a subscriber basis. Asked about the switch to a largely free website (some features, such as TradersWire, still require a paid subscription), Kwong replied they realized there were many people whose needs could be served, who could be reached simply by making a large amount of the content available for free. "Hey, we've got good information," Kwong summarized the collective decision, "useful practical information. Wouldn't it be great for more people to see it?"

And getting a chance to see it is a lot of what TradingMarkets is all about. As Kwong said, "This is what we do ... people make a living at it over here. It's their entire lifestyle." While other websites have offered mere glimpses and occasional snapshots of traders at work, it can be said without qualification that TradingMarkets.com has taken this farther and further than anyone else. Any trader looking for advice from true "traders in the field" will find TradingMarkets well worth visiting.

-David Penn, Technical Writer


Originally published in the December 2005 issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine. All rights reserved. © Copyright 2005, Technical Analysis, Inc.
Return to Table of Contents