I-Watch
from herbalslim on Clearstation
clearstation.com
I believe I can be of service to the crew on SI debating the virtues of Thomson's
I-Watch. If you have time, would you be so kind as to post this message as a
reply to the post linked above on SI. Much appreciated.
AS Milo has properly explained, the I-watch lists institutional, or large block
interest. Tejek has stated that his observations say that it is not reliable. Both
are correct.
I-watch is a subscription service for those that wnat to list interest on it. The
way it works in reality is as follows: let's say you are an institution that wants
to unload 100K shares into the market of AMD. Well, you want to unload at a
most favorable time if you can. So instead of posting a sell interest, you post a
buy interest, which is exactly the opposite of your intentions. I-Watch now
shows a large buyer on the board where there isn't really one. Why do this? To
flush out your competition. If you get a lot of response looking to sell you those
large blocks, you know there are a lot of sellers around and hence, a bad time to
unload into the market. WHen one of them calls you to say they have the shares
you want, you say "oh thanks, but someone else beat you too it. Sorry!" Then
you cancel your listing and try again later. You do the reverse if you want to
buy.
How many participants do this? Unknown, but a knowledgable source once told
me that he suspected 60-70% of all the listings were bogus ones intended to
smoke out the competition. But he also said that there was no way of telling and
the % changes every day.
The conclusion is very clear: on any given day, the data is corrupted to an
unknown degree, rendering it USELESS to gauge anything other than the naivete
of the uninformed investing public (this is where ajbrenner comes in - no
offense aj!). It also proves that Ted is an astute observer, as he stated that he has
removed it from his site list.
Hope this helps. As I told Goutama, i will join SI when AMD closes above 100
for the first time. At this rate, it is going to be a while.
regards,
herb
PS - I was intrigued by the posts by Doug SF30 re:GTW and 1gig T-Bird. What
is the likelhood that HP would announce a shift to all Athlon 1 gigs at retail if
there was a problem with the chip? Oh, and has anyone over there TM'd the
lament of Fat Bastard from Austin Powers II - "I am so fat I haven't seen my
Willy in two years!!" ? |
