Articles

The term Direct Market Access is used often in the industry and yet a lot of people do not know what it means or indeed how to use it. The term, in fact, relates to the use of the order book, a system used by market participants to trade directly with each other by inputting their sale and buy orders and waiting until they match. The system is more commonly referred to as Level 2. The first major benefit of using Level 2 is that it is the main mechanism used by the market to trade. It is used by all of the major traders such as institutional investors, hedge funds, and private individuals. Its benefits are significant as it enables market participants to buy at the bid and sell at the offer price. Consider the following example which...

Today is Monday December 27th and the US is open. Many would say, "oh, what's the point, the action will be thin and the pickings, if any, hard." Well, in my experience, that approach is mistaken. 36 minutes before the market even opened today, I read this story: "Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) said Monday the 2004 Holiday season was its "best ever", with the online retailer setting a record of more than 2.8 million units ordered in a single-day, or 32 items per second worldwide. The Seattle-based company said consumer electronics sales was its largest sales category." Again many would say, "oh, the news will be in the price so it's pointless" This is also just plain wrong a lot of the time. I have traded AMZN three times today, all...