Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts

Nov 9, 2007

No Prophet

I talked a few weeks ago about how Prophet was raising their prices on the Silver membership from $29.95 to $44.95. Now, the main issue I had was that I used Prophet for my data feed. However, the feed, just like their scans were unreliable at times. Even with that I was still prepared to fork over a lump sum 1-year membership at the $29.95 monthly rate. I needed to do this by 10/31. I waited till 10/31. I called their office on 10/31 and heard a recording that their were off for the holiday. Holiday??? Are they talking about Halloween? I wasn't aware they employed witches and ghosts and needed to respect the 'national' holiday. So, I called on 11/1. Same message. Guess they employ saints too.
I gave up and said fuck it. They have the worst customer service out there. Oh sure, you can get a person online, but they can't figure shit out and always refer to their 'technical' department which doesn't show up till 11am EST since they're based in CA. 11am when the markets open at 9:30??? Nice. For the last week I've been using my IB scan along with the gapper list provided by Jamie or Knight Trader and the IB data feed. I haven't missed Prophet one single bit. IB's backfill takes a lot longer than Prophet, but since I can pull my scans early on... time isn't really that big of an issue.

Nov 6, 2007

Missed opportunities

Hindsight is 20/20... yeah, yeah, yeah. If a stock is in my watchlist and if that watchlist is not that long and I miss a trade... then I'm doing something wrong and not looking in the right places. Personally, I have distractions to deal with so I can kinda blame it on that, but sometimes I just get downright bored looking for setups and often will close the computer at a certain time. This will probably change when I return to the US as my work day will start and end sooner than it currently does.
Back to the hindsight thing. I'm still waiting for the perfect trading day. Don't get this confused with executing perfect trades. The perfect trading day for me is spotting and capitalizing on every (or most every - I'm not that anal) opportunity that presents itself in my watchlist.
It can and will be done.

EDIT: Guess I should mention SMSI (15-min) and LFC (30-min) were nice missed opps. There was some movement on my watchlist after all :)