Live Squawk SP500 - Valuable?

[TradeWatcher]

I was introduced to a live squawk service recently. I know some traders that claim it is a very valuable service and well worth the effort to learn, understand, etc.

Also Bright provides the following as a service for each office. I was wondering what other traders thought of the live squawk idea. It seems like a good one.

I am considering getting into trading and am investigating all(?)/any ideas I run into.

The link below is to realtime that I heard about.

http://www.realtimefutures.com

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Thanks in advance for any significant input on this thread.

 

[DaveN]

I'd say it depends.....

Mostly, it depends on your style of trading. If you are trading highly correlated stocks on a short term basis, or you trade longer intraday swings, the information you can get from the pit can help you assess the strength of a move or the climax of a turning point.

It will also give you a pretty good, although very short-lived leading indicator of market movement. Although, with the speed of electronic executions on the EMini's, I feel that I get just as much leading indication looking at a 10 tick chart of the ES.

What I do value quite a bit is the additional information such as the amount of paper in the pit, who's been offering on top of the market for the last hour, the size of the paper bid, whether "Morgan's on the phone and then looking..." Those tend to be very valuable for me in my style of trading.