For years now subscribers of the Sunday Links newsletter enjoy weekly market updates (sample), two-months market outlooks (sample), and Saturday Barron's summaries (sample). In the newsletter, you did see the link to the original source of those, TradeTheNews. Today I want to present the service behind these informative bits and introduce you to this feature-rich source, highlighting a few more sides of it you may have not seen.
(Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in TTN, nor do I get paid for this post or compensated for subscriptions) .
At its heart TTN is a real-time scrolling news source. Thus, its default view has the headlines occupying main area. They scroll, you read - simple as that. Of course, you don't have to watch them all the time. There are sound alerts when something significant happens (more on that later). Also, you read more details behind the headline by hovering your cursor over it, like so:
You can also click on the headline, and full text will appear in the bottom part, where you will also have an access to other related news, upcoming earnings and current holders of the stock:
Speaking of that bottom area, you have a default tab "Show Market Data." It displays S&P 500 real time changes, and there is more to it. First, you can switch to other market indicators, if you prefer - NASDAQ, VIX, even Gold or Oil, etc. Second, there are red circles on the chart. Those are indication of a certain event happened at that point in time. Pointing your cursor to it and reading the event details, you can match the information to the market change:
This kind of matching the event to the market response is not only informative, it's educational as well. You get a sense for how market is likely to behave when influenced by various news. It's more nuanced than a primitive "good news - up, bad news - down" view that befalls many traders. If you are familiar with my A Taoist Trader, 111 Trades and other materials, you can see how this idea of verifying the market moves against the information/news background goes to the very heart of my trading approach. Being familiar with patterns described, among others, in Techniques of Tape Reading, utilized by Jesse Livermore and valid since, well, forever, you can gauge which stage of the movement the market is. Is tulip mania at the beginning or at the peak - that's the question you need to answer to understand how the next news item is likely to impact the market. Good news can push the stock upward if it comes at the beginning stages of the movement, and can have just the opposite effect at the top of the move. Accumulation by smart money at the early phase vs. euphoric buying by the crowds at the final stage, and how the news fit in this context - if you have a firm grasp of these concepts, you have the key to the markets. TTN provides the tools for such understanding. In case these concepts are new to you, let me offer you this chart as a means to pique your curiosity and as a starting point for the further research:
But I digress.
Remember a bit about sound alerts? It's not just your rudimentary beep getting your attention when something of importance happens. It's also a squawk box, voice commenting on the latest news of note, so you can hear it while watching the market or browsing other tabs in your browser:
Let's move on to the other features. There is a Calendar tab where you can familiarize yourself with all important events of the upcoming week and switch between different world regions:
As you look at those tabs, you will notice a few more, providing wealth of information and mostly self-explanatory. Let me show you how they look and what kind of information they provide. Filers tab:
...and Top Stories tab:
Now that have first idea of the interface, I'll leave you to explore the rest of it to discover the TTN's full potential. One more aspect to mention is e-mail alerts. You can configure them to control the volume of incoming e-mails according to your interests and trading style. For instance, to prepare for the beginning of trading day, Pre-Market Movers is invaluable. This is what you get:
There is Morning and Evening Papers Summary, Online Reading Summary, Market Close Summary, Event Watch, midday Trading Hours Summary... if you get overwhelmed by choice, just watch them all for a week or two to get a sense of which of them are useful for you.
Let me wrap it up by saying that there is a lot more to the TTN offerings, and the main thing you are likely to discover is a value of a single well-organized and thought-through source of information and analysis.
