UK Trading

[Shanghai]

I've been trading for a while now and am finally happy with the systems I am working with. However the markets that suit my time zone are in the UK, mainly shares. I have trading friends in the US and it seems as though they are much better catered for than UK traders. Perhaps there are resources I don't know about so I would be very grateful if anyone could give me feedback on some points.

1 Market internals. My US trader friends use market internal indicators such as "new high - new lows" / "summation index" etc. Is there any equivalent data easily available for the UK? If so where from?

2 Data feed. I currently use Metastock with Reuters data feed. For the US this is nicely split down into the different indices and sectors. With the UK this is all just grouped into the "London Stock Exchange". I can make custom lists but keeping them updated would be difficult. Are there any alternative data feeds worth considering? I would consider any alternatives to Metastock if other consider that different packages are more appropriate.

3 And of course always a topic for discussion is spreadbetting vs direct access. Direct access is not really an option for shorter term trades due to UK stamp duty. So this is not really a question but just an observation that to trade UK stock there are few options other than spreadbetting.

Several questions here so it doesn't fit neatly into any other forum.

Appreciate any feedback.

 

[ahad22]

I've been trading for a while now and am finally happy with the systems I am working with. However the markets that suit my time zone are in the UK, mainly shares. I have trading friends in the US and it seems as though they are much better catered for than UK traders. Perhaps there are resources I don't know about so I would be very grateful if anyone could give me feedback on some points.

1 Market internals. My US trader friends use market internal indicators such as "new high - new lows" / "summation index" etc. Is there any equivalent data easily available for the UK? If so where from?

2 Data feed. I currently use Metastock with Reuters data feed. For the US this is nicely split down into the different indices and sectors. With the UK this is all just grouped into the "London Stock Exchange". I can make custom lists but keeping them updated would be difficult. Are there any alternative data feeds worth considering? I would consider any alternatives to Metastock if other consider that different packages are more appropriate.

3 And of course always a topic for discussion is spreadbetting vs direct access. Direct access is not really an option for shorter term trades due to UK stamp duty. So this is not really a question but just an observation that to trade UK stock there are few options other than spreadbetting.

Several questions here so it doesn't fit neatly into any other forum.

Appreciate any feedback.

In terms of market internals like tick,trin, a/d volume and adv/dec issues you can construct them using a package called neoticker, a market breadth tool package.
For the ftse100 You need to specify the 100 stocks or maybe the ftse 350 stocks
for a better representation.

TickQuest Inc. NeoTicker(R) Solution Tour

You can also a package by updata that also had market internals for ftse like
a/d vol, trin, a/d issues and sectors..

- Updata

For the london stock exchange theirs the ftse 100 and ftse 250 which are the main indexes, plus the techmark 100. The above package lists the specific index and stock components for you and also the sectors.