Irby, the time and sales chart is useless the way it is configured by default.
Turn off the bid and offer size. I'm not sure why they are there in the first place (but I have an idea, see below).
I set the background to black, the bid to red, the trade to yellow, and the offer to green.
Now, you will see a nice "envelope" around the trades. Particularly nice for NASDAQ stocks, and a big plus on the open, when you can see the pre-opening jockying between the MMs as the bids and offers are updated.
Worthless on NYSE and AMEX stocks, because there is no way to filter to show only NYSE updates, and you get a "hedgehog" effect (fuzzy lines) from the away-from-market bids/offers from third-market exchanges.
I don't like tick charts, because they only show the last trade, and you lose sight of where the market really is (e.g. the bids and offers).
I don't think that this is what Townsend had in mind when they put in the time and sales chart, though. I think they added it early on before they had a real time and sales tabular format, as a cheap way of getting that. That is, if you double-click on the time and sales chart, you get a tabular listing. I think they put it in just because they knew they'd get that tabular listing "for free" (since it works on all charts). |
