Site Administrator Swing Trader Data Scientist & DevOps
Manta, Ecuador
Experience: Advanced
Platform: My own custom solution
Trading: Emini Futures
Posts: 49,780 since Jun 2009
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It is going to depend on your trading style.
MultiCharts is a great platform for trading equities + futures. It has a nice market scanner and you can set alerts and do a lot of very powerful charting (like overlaying sector ETF's on an individual stock in the sector for analysis, etc).
InteractiveBrokers is probably the most popular equities broker. They have a great order routing system and their commissions are good. You can use IB with MultiCharts. There is also a stand-alone trading app from IB but it has minimal features compared to a full charting program.
If you are looking for an all-in-one, I would say ThinkOrSwim. It's charting+data+broker in one package. So the charting is not as good as MultiCharts, the broker/commission is not as good as IB, but it's all-in-one which may have some advantages for you.
I don't know that you need any special setup to trade stocks, but then (except for a brief sojourn into YM) I've never traded anything else. If you're trading 5min or longer charts, then probably nothing that you don't now have is needed.
I do some scalping trades off a 1 min. chart (with the rest being from 2min with 5min confirmation) and at that level, in my opinion, you have to have 1) a direct-access broker and, 2) a Level 2 with time and sales.
Most of my entries are from charts but, after entry, trade management is largely from level 2.
There's a lot of information there that can't be had from a chart. In fact, if someone told me I had to give up
either my charts or my level 2, I'd be hard pressed to make a decision.
A Direct access feed (I'm with Genesis) gives you incredible speed of execution---your order goes straight to the market, instead of through your broker-- as well as a full complement of ECNs on the level 2. I have every bid and ask level on every market maker and ECN--not just the best bid/ask. Again, if you're not scalping short time frames, this may be irrelevant.
Another advantage to a broker like Genesis (or Lightspeed, I think) is that you can negotiate for commission costs, and you get full flow-through of ECN rebates for 'adding liquidity' to the market.
As for news, there are only two affordable live news feeds I know of: Trade the News, and Fly on the Wall. TTN seems to be rather elitest,, based on the info ( or lack of) that I've managed to get from them. Fly is anything but....and can be had for $20/mo (if you pay by the year). This includes scrolling news, a search option, and a live audio feed.
I think it's a deal.
If you need a scanner, figure out what you want to scan for, and someone here might be able to cobble you something together for NT. That Man from Texas (TMFT) just did that for me, and it's helped a lot in finding setups. I keep a basket of about 80 stocks that I scan for reversion to a MA.
You might take a look at Trade-Ideas Pro scanner, which costs about 50 bucks a month, I think. If you have an account (an IRA will do) that you're willing to give to Scottrade, you can get the Trade Ideas scanner for free. I recently moved a couple of IRAs to them, and got the scanner and a price alert system for individual stocks (that is really needed in NT).
Hope this helps.
strider
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I think that if you can learn a little bit about Wyckoff it may be one of the best ways to trade equities. The method may even be better with equities than futures, but I don't know if that is true. Considering that Wyckoff traded stocks it makes sense that it works well with stocks. If you look at charts going way back when we didn't have computers and they drew charts by hand, you see the exact same characteristics today. I think one indicator can be useful as a confirmation of other analysis, but I think that the indicator will lag the Wyckoff analysis unless there happens to be a divergence in conjunction with support and resistance.
David
The following 3 users say Thank You to David_R for this post:
One other comment, forget about what Goldman or any other entity has to say about the stock you want to invest in. That goes for news too. Read the chart and it should tell you what you need to know. If Goldman did downgrade the stock, why is it you think they did that? To help their clients or buy it at a cheaper prices?
