Rick, Nas NMS Tick? NMS stands for 'National Market Securities' The Nasdaq is made up of about 3300 companies. About 2650 of those are listed as NMS. The other 650 companies are listed as 'small caps'. Small caps account for about 5%-6% of the total volume of shares traded each day on Nasdaq.
The Nasdaq NMS tick is the uptick/downtick indicator of the nasdaq less the small caps. I like using the the NMS because program trades do not usually include small caps. By using the NMS tick I get a better indication of when large program trades hit. I have found that I want to be on the side of the program traders. Following the tick helps me with that.
My platform feed updates the tick every 20-30 seconds. When I see a sudden move on the tick of 200 or more points in a 60 second time frame, I have a good indication that a large program trade has hit. I then watch the QQQ and the nasdaq composite to see how the market digested that program trade. If I see large program trades hit and little movement in the QQQ or the comp, that would suggest that the programers are running into heavy selling and we may see a turn soon.
On my Street Smart pro charts I can overlay the tick on to the nas comp. That is really cool.
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