Market Watch is a valuable website that gives important business information, market news, research, and stock market info. In addition to The Wall Street Journal, it’s a joint venture of Dow Jones & Company and Barron’s, a publication of the News Corporation. It’s free to sign up and they have a frequently asked questions page. It also has a frequently asked question archive. This article will explore what else is on this outstanding website.
As one can imagine, a website devoted to providing Market Watch is going to cover all of the different exchanges. From those which are most active – such as NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the NASDAQ Composite Market – to less active, such as the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBX) or the Over the Counter Bulletin Board (OTCBB) – Market Watch covers it all. They’ve got a number of different interactive charts and graphs covering all of these topics. Some of the more interesting ones might include current stock traded amounts, the S&P 500 (SPX), the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DOW Jones Inc.) and the technology-related sectors.
One of the features of Market Watch is their “ecologist” tool. Ecologists are simply term that refers to people who study how people in the real world behave. An ecologist looking at a green living green tree is going to behave a lot like an ecologist looking at a green living human being. This tool is extremely useful for getting a general idea of how the various sectors of the market may be performing, but is limited to providing the granual information necessary to make informed decisions.
One of the features of Market Watch, which I find very useful is its context menu. It lists all of the individual symbols under separate headings for easy viewing. The most frequently used symbol in this context menu is the volume up arrow. Beneath the volume up arrow you’ll find a few more general arrows and a list of pending orders. You can even drill down into certain symbols for even more detailed information about that particular symbol. The feature works especially well when you need to quickly see some kind of trend line or other kind of trend graph.
Another feature of Market Watch, which I find very useful is the real-time surveillance feed. This allows traders to follow real-time surveillance feeds from a variety of sources such as news organizations, brokers, central clearing houses, electronic news services and even social networks like Facebook and Twitter. These feeds provide the market watch user with real-time surveillance on any given trade that they may be interested in and allow them to either trade ahead of the curve (post-market trend), or do what they think will be the best move based on the signals they picked up.
Finally, Market Watch offers a very useful feature that I haven’t mentioned yet, and that is the material news overlay. What this does is essentially creates an overlay on top of any given day’s market activity so that the trader can see exactly where the big moves are coming from, as well as what direction they’re headed. Basically, you can now tell where the markets are “staying” or moving in a given direction based on material news reports. For instance, if you’re a bullish trader and you notice that there’s been some positive material news reported recently about one of the Dow sectors, you can easily set your stop loss accordingly. You can also use the overlay to your advantage and set your stop loss based on the overlays, and only trade when the price of that particular sector reaches a certain level (i.e. a certain level of the currency pair in your trading system).