It’s not often that we get a real chance to trade news as it happens, and to get an edge on it. Take today’s oil story of explosions. I first saw two tweets with pictures pop up around 15.30 gmt and after seeing a third decided to take a long, a pure ‘see news, hit buy button’ move.

I know this is an ‘after the event’ thing so here’s what I skyped Adam at the time;

Skype

In between that I was sweating for a bit waiting for the move to come as I was typing out the story to put up on site. Just as I hit publish I heard it come out on Livesquawk and up she went 70 ticks, and out I got for around 50. The thing with news is that if you’re in early you can steal a march on the market and can be getting out just as everyone else is getting in. After I bailed it fell back and I thought I’d done well.

Then Reuters picked it up and we jumped again nearly a buck to near 85. That was largely an untradeable move as if it’s on Reuters then everyone is hammering it. Then came the news that it wasn’t an oil pipeline and down we went, then further Reuters news hit that it wasn’t even a big incident and we went right back to where we started.

In today’s tech driven world it is hard to trade news. Back in my LIFFE days we had one news source to to watch on a shared screen in the pit and so it was a fairly level playing field and the quickest to react got the trades. Now we’re very lucky to catch a news break like today, but they do happen.

We’re currently working hard behind the scenes to bring you an even faster service than we do now. If we get the tech we’re hoping for then you’d have gotten that news maybe a minute or two quicker than when it went up (my slow typing skills excluded) and hopefully have had time to make a winning trade.

In the meantime there are plenty of other ways to trade the news and you can gain a very good grasp on it by having a look at Adam’s “8 Secrets to trading the news”, just near the top right of the main page. Ok, I now sound like I’m making a sales pitch but it only costs you a name and an email address and not your credit card details so nothing big.

Here’s the intro.

intro