Inside Market
The inside market is the best bid and the best ask. These two prices often give a very good idea of the current price of a stock. These two numbers, together, offer an alternative to the common practice of just listing the price of the last print.
One advantage of looking at the inside market is that you can see the spread. This gives you some idea of just how precise you can really be when you quote a price. If you just use the last print price, you can fool yourself into believing that a formula can tell you more than it really can.
Another reason we like the inside market is because it is real. Someone is willing to buy the stock at one price, and someone is willing to sell it at another. When you see an individual print, that could mean anything. There may be just one print at the high price of the day, and 10,000 traders staring at the chart, wishing they had sold there. That print was just a fantasy.
The inside market also offers a predictive quality. For a stock to trade, two people have to agree on a price. The inside market shows the first half of that, before the second person comes in.
The inside market is also relatively stable. The price of the last print can vary a lot, for no good reason. In order for the inside market to move, a lot of traders all have to change their prices, and there can be no new traders can be willing to fill in.
In general we use the inside market to validate a lot of our short term alerts, including the ones listed below. For the longer term alerts we use statistical analysis to aggregate large numbers of prints.
Alert Types
We offer the following alert types which are related to this topic. Click on the icon for a detailed description of the alert, or click on the "more" link for additional examples of each type of alert.
| Type | Recent Examples | More Examples | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time (NY) | Symbol | Message | ||
 | Nov 20th, 7:56:18 PM | BNX | Running up: +0.1499 in less than one minute. | more |
 | Nov 20th, 7:43:33 PM | BBI | Running down: -0.03 in less than one minute. | more |
 | Nov 20th, 7:45:06 PM | INO | Running up: +0.03 in 22 minutes 18 seconds | more |
 | Nov 20th, 7:44:55 PM | BBI | Running down: -0.0301 in 63 seconds | more |
 | Nov 20th, 7:58:07 PM | SVU | Channel breakout from $14.91-15.00, 9 hours 21 minutes. | more |
 | Nov 20th, 7:59:48 PM | YHOO | Channel breakdown from $15.37-15.42, 5 hours 14 minutes. | more |
 | Nov 20th, 7:58:07 PM | SVU | Crossed above resistance, 15.03. Time: 9 hours 29 minutes. Volume: 2,508,480. | more |
 | Nov 20th, 7:59:48 PM | YHOO | Crossed below support, 15.37. Time: 4 hours 7 minutes. Volume: 1,815,681. | more |
