With a little experience you will notice your ability to pick up on market conditions quickly and intuitively with a glance at the DOM or Tape. Whether it be the size and refresh rate of the bids and offers, the speed of the tape whipping by, or the back and forth of the prints..  as your day trading skill increases you will be able to gauge quite accurately how good the market action is for trading. 

Listening to PriceSquawk, you have another powerful dimension in which you can gauge market conditions. PriceSquawk audio captures the speed of the tape, the size of trades and the volatility of the market in the one audio stream and is a great gauge for the present order flow conditions.

I spend many hours staring at the screen each day, and welcome the opportunity to rest my eyes when the market action is not ideal, while still monitoring the flows with some headphones on.  I am not worried about missing on anything, as even if a flutter of activity suddenly occurs, this does not usually represent the type of order flow I take advantage of. Instead I like to hear at least 30 seconds to one minute of action before the screens deserve my full attention, and I should zone into the tape and DOM accordingly. So there is plenty of time to take advantage of this and rest the eyes or step away. This freedom is a major reason PriceSquawk was originally developed:

Lately I have been experimenting with a few audio streamers from my trading machine to a mobile device which I can then listen to with headphones on (as opposed to blasting the apartment with markets).  This lets me recharge on the balcony looking at the ocean while enjoying a cuppa when the markets are quiet, and I can then step back into the game 100% when it is ON. This freedom has really improved my enjoyment of trading. Staring at the screen through slow action for the sake of not missing the move of the day, can not only be mind numbingly painful, but can be costly.

Audio Streamers

Here are some apps designed to stream your system audio to mobile devices that can be used to listen to the order flow with PriceSquawk on your home network, or in some cases across the web.

Soundwire from georgielabs.net

This lets you listen to PriceSquawk on your Android and has the shortest delay of all the choices since it lets you tune the buffer and compression to minimize latency. PriceSquawk audio was as clear as listening through my computer directly and delayed by < 0.5s, and its free.

Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba

Works great from your PC to apple devices. I was trying it out on my iPad. It lets you isolate applications so you can only hear PriceSquawk audio across the network. The delay appeared a little longer than Soundwire but not a big deal if it takes you 30 seconds to walk back to the PC.  There is a license fee of $25 for this software but you can try it for free for 10 minutes before an intentional noise winds up to irritate you into buying it.

Airphones

From all appearances this does what we are after for 32 bit Windows OS systems, streaming audio from your PC to apple device. I had issues installing it though but I am on a 64 bit PC.

Bluetooth

You may want to experiment with just connecting via bluetooth to your PC. Some mobile devices allow you to listen to the audio this way. There are some instructions here

Mobile Day Trading

In recent years there has been a move towards mobile day trading which would be the ultimate freedom, though my guess is it will probably work out better for those that don’t venture too far from their trading desks.  We see have seen trends in mobile friendly retail trading platforms, and surprisingly even TT are getting in on the mobile day trading action with their html friendly Nextrader platform. 

I like the idea that I would have the discipline to go across the road to the park and trade from my iPad with an ocean backdrop, however I don’t think my trading account would agree.  Perhaps finding a corner in a cafe would work with good noise cancelling headphones, as you can get nearly all of the order flow information input necessary from PriceSquawk audio which will help keep you in the zone. The smaller the screen, the more you can rely on audible markets to follow and react to the order flow. Once you have listened to the market for long enough, you might even wonder what you are looking at on all those computer screens in the first place!