Google Finance 101
Make a Bootleg Bloomberg
I wasted $100s of dollars a month for years trying to get tools to better understand the market. It wasn’t until I made my own process where I started to have success. Chasing charts like every new trader and expecting a better result is wishful thinking (unless you’re top 1% in trade execution). Most of us don’t have time to follow the market for every tick.
What we all need is a simple, inexpensive method to track the market. If it could do it 24/7/365 that would be great too. That’s the point of this post, you can. And you can do it for free.
Use google finance data to get historical (and real-time) stock market data, for free. It’s not hard to use google docs but I made a quick video walking you through the process. Also, I answered the tough questions, “Can I see Bitcoin in google finance?”, the answer is “yes”.
This is the thing for most traders, we rely on other people’s work to form our opinions, find our ideas or give us a setup for entries, exits and everything else. This is the weakness for us. We should all have our own tools, process and framework. This starts with getting the data.
All the indicators you love in the world are based on historical stock data, not chart patterns.
When we pretend looking at a chart helps us trade, why doesn’t everyone who uses a chart get the same result? Oh because the chart isn’t a process. Viewing a chart of a stock can be a start but it’s not worth much more than being used as an artifact.
Charts help you make sense of what happened but often they are where edge goes to die. True edge is only developed in a proprietary process….I used to not believe this but it’s true. Natural occurring phenomenon will eventually be discovered and arbitraged away. That’s a free market. Competition is very real in markets.
If you’re using the same tools, you’ll get the same result unless you’re incredibly skilled which maybe you are but I doubt it. But now you can start to build your edge, your model and your method. This is the point of Bootleg Macro, to empower you with tools and education.