Get the Research You Need to Day Trade

Many brokerage firms offer day trading services. They all have services that tell you what the prices are for any stock or other security at any time, but this doesn’t mean that they have all of the prices that you need for your strategy.

One solution is to get prices from a separate source that offers faster delivery. Other trading strategies don’t require real-time prices on huge numbers of securities, but they may involve a detailed analysis of end-of-day prices. To do that, you may need more information than your broker can give you.

Here are some price quote and data services you may wish to consider:

The quote service can provide the data in real time only if you have enough bandwidth to receive it. Make sure you have the fastest Internet service and modem available in your area and consider having a second way to connect to the Internet if your primary service goes down.

CQG

CQG pulls data from pretty much all of the world's exchanges, making it popular with people who are trading international securities. It also has data on over-the-counter foreign exchange. Traders can buy historical data for backtesting and they can add charting and order routing capabilities to their CQG package. People who want to do even more number crunching on their own can link the data to their Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

eSignal

eSignal offers detailed prices, news, and trading alerts in most financial markets, delivered to your computer or your phone. Its charting features are more advanced than those offered by most brokerage firms. Especially useful for traders who are looking at several different stocks, eSignal can help identify trading opportunities using a preferred strategy and scan the market for other stocks that meet specified investment criteria. The company also offers backtesting and real-time strategy testing, end-of-day analysis for traders who don’t need real-time data, and add-on signals that support different proprietary trading strategies.

InstaQuote

InstaQuote, owned by Banc of America Securities, has data designed for equity options traders. It gives traders price quotes on both options and equities so that they can identify price discrepancies and monitor valuation. It then connects to the exchange’s electronic communications networks, allowing for direct access trading. InstaQuote’s platform can work with several different brokerage firms' accounts.

Telvent DTN Trading

Trading fuel or agricultural products? Then you may need more research than most brokers can give you. Telvent, which produces a huge range of data for farmers and drillers, has plenty of services for traders, too. Telvent DTN provides pricing and research for commodities traders, including meteorological research and hurricane-related energy supply forecasts.

Day traders active in stocks or financial futures are more likely to use the company’s IQ data feeds, which allow users to track 1,300 prices simultaneously, and ProphetX, software that combines price data with analytics that can track small market movements and can handle displays on several different monitors at once. Telvent DTN even has a mobile pricing application.

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