March Madness, in the medium term...

Well, in my short day trading blog I've mentioned about using a new (to me) software and online service for charting.

Esignals.

They provide a fairly robust charting package which gives me almost everything that I would look for in a trading software package...for now. The reason I mention it over here is that it has some nice features that will translate well for medium term trading.

Specifically the ability to plot pivot points for varying timeframes automatically. While this is a great benefit for day trading it has it's advantages in longer term trading as well. Particularly when I can go back in historical studies and see the old pivot points plotted in the past without having to do any number crunching and manual plotting.

Now I had to do a bit of basic style programming to get what I wanted but it certainly will pay off in the long run.

About paying...this is not a cheap package deal. The cost is $125 per month plus about $40 in data access fees. Now the data access is expensive only because I want level 2 market depth quotes, otherwise I could get away with under $10 in fees...$2 extra if I wanted NYSE data. I think I could get delayed or end of day data for no extra charge too.

Anyway. I have a 30 day trial after which time I will have to pay for the past 30 days, so it is not free, just a money back guarantee. So I am one week down now and I have all my setups in and pages configured how I need them for now. I am sure that I may tweak them later but I need to get trading to get a feel for how this will work...and make some money to pay for the extra expense.

I worked out the cost benefit and decided that over my normal 60 trades per month it is the same as taking my commission/ECN fee from about $5.40 to $8.80.

All this because I decided that I need better data flow for my trading...I don't really need it for medium term trading but I will definitely take advantage of the conveniences available.

That's all for now.

Jeff.