This is cool, but my experience with trading stocks is that you need to spend money in order to be on a remotely-level playing field with the whales. Ignoring that so much stock market data costs money, there’s also the matter of direct fiber connections to exchanges, brokers who batch your order with others resulting in subpar fill prices relative to bid-ask spread, the pattern day trading rule that only affects poor people, the simple fact that the 1% have insider information and use it to trade stocks for a guaranteed win… really having a dashboard of charts is the least valuable piece, though I admit it is a piece.

I could be mistaken but I thought the reason Bloomberg Terminals are so expensive is because they come with the expensive, real-time data feeds.

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michelb 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The real moat of the Bloomberg terminals is the messaging feature that connects you to the other traders.

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gymbeaux 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Fascinating. It’s called Instant Bloomberg and it’s just AOL instant messenger but only between Bloomberg Terminals. So that is absolutely the “data that insiders rely on that pedestrians will never have” and I’m sure it offers tremendous advantage and may explain why stocks trend in a direction for extended periods of time absent any public news.

I mean there’s no way average joes like us stand a chance doing anything but dollar cost averaging into index funds.

E: imagine if there was a law passed that required those IMs to be public in near-real-time (releasing the transcripts days later defeats the purpose).

	▲	michelb 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I disagree on us average joes not standing a chance. It's pretty easy to ride the wave of popular stocks or commodities simply by following the macro trends in the news and staying informed on global developments. It's more risky than index funds, but being able to ride a bit of the Nvidia hype and then de-risking those proceeds into an index fund is nice. You'll probably never win with day-trading or HFT though. (not financial advice!)