Using an analogy... picture your first year of Med School viewing your first few xray's along side a 15 year veteran.
The idea is.... reading data MUST become repiticious to the point of over-kill to understand values within historical, and using the 10day moving average forum you may already know about.
If you take the above 200 days back what do you see in a trading pattern? High volume days verses other day?
It would look something using the 7th and 10daya back.
WFCS .005 191k vs 5k volume 10day average.
If you divide the 5k into the 191k that's approx. 38x the last 10 days average volume. That is huge. Not so much the actual volume but the change or disparate volume.
So let's say you spotted WFSC that day, and took time to look at both L2 & Time_Sales. Without both, trading strategies cannot be formed with all tools being used.
Since you are a non-subscriber, I'll post my activity on the 7th: I didn't say that much on this particular stock the day of... but I'm sure I was thinking the same thing as with other 10Day Alerts.
How is both L2 & Time_Sales reacting together....
WFSC .003/.01 setting up nicely here 191k now SuperC 01/07/2013 03:06:06 PM
WFSC .0021 on 50k now .005 SuperC 01/07/2013 03:03:33 PM
So, you see a new symbol you don't recognize, you check the trading pattern. You then watch it L2 & Time_Sales because there are quite a few clues when watching both allowing you too see different trading strategies Market Makers set up before a run.
A lot more too it but those are the basics. You also need to know enough about which symbols trade a lot on iHub in order to know the ones that don't. That way when the one's that don't pop up within your software? It's time to check historical, financials, website, check to see who's talking about it on iHub, chatter.. what's being said, etc.
In other words if you really want to take trading seriously you need to subscribe too include ihub data in your bag of DD Points.
Stock Data iHub Data Chart Data
In reference to WFCS on the 7th.. it was the WAY>>> it was trading that day, and not which Market Maker was lined up... that helped solidify the possibly of a good play coming up.