What is the best place to see trades bought and sold of funds and shares and news?

GeoffTF

wmb194 said:

GeoffTF said:

wmb194 said:

isayhello said:

Thanks and this might be a silly question but how can you tell from trades when a stock is doing badly then, for instance many investors want to sell? because it sounds like it will always balance out with people buying it then.

Any recommendations for news on funds and shares would be great too thanks. 

The LSE itself doesn't collect the data on whether the trade was a buy or a sell but data providers using its data will make a guess on whether it's a buy or a sell based upon how close the traded price is to the bid or the offer at the time the trade was reported.

That may make sense if the trade is through a market maker, but that just adds to or takes from the market maker's inventory. The size of that inventory has to be managed. Purchases and sales of shares ultimately have to be balanced by the market maker's customers. It is also possible to trade via the order book, in an auction or off market.

That's not relevant, all I'm talking about is how the trades reported to the LSE are interpreted. It doesn't matter whether it's via a market maker, matched bargain or anything else. If you watch live trade data it's done on the fly.

We do not want to get into violent agreement here. Apart from explaining how purchases and sales ultimately balance, the point that I am making is that the reported trades on the LSE are not necessarily representative. In some cases, most of the trades will be off market. Sometimes deliberately so, to hide the fact that there is a big buy or sell programme in progress. Market makers may be trading off market as well.

GeoffTF

Thrugelmir said:

GeoffTF said:

I saw an article that suggested that the likes of Robin Hood get paid for order flow partly because it is valuable to know what the dumb money is doing.

Robinhood does not operate in the UK. The regulatory regime in the US is very different. Direct comparisons are as a result meaningless. 

It is true that the studies that found that the shares that retail investors sell outperform those that they buy were not conducted in the UK. Nonetheless, I do not know of any evidence that UK retail investors are more savvy than overseas investors. The article I read implied that it was possible to make a profit by doing the opposite of the retail investors. That is interesting, but I doubt whether it is really the basis of a profitable strategy.

Phantom151

isayhello said:

I'd like to view the trades that have been made for a share, bought and sold in a day or the last few hours but I haven't been able to find something that's easy to understand. On the LSE site I could see trading volumes for some shares but it was a limited amount and I couldn't tell if they were buys or sells.

For news on funds and shares I've been looking at the pages on HL which have been useful.

I'm a newbie to learning about this stuff and wondered if more experienced folks have suggestions they use?

thanks

sharesmagazine.co.uk will show you some of what you are looking for. Unfortunately they stopped showing the spread which makes it difficult to tell if they were buys or sells. It is possible to get a vague idea but it isn't foolproof. There was a site that did more or less what you are looking for but they got bought out and the new owner put it behind a paywall a few years ago. Can't remember who that was though. Bear in mind that nobody publishes data that can conclusively say if it was a buy or a sell as that data is not made available by brokers. You can only take an educated guess by looking at the buy/sell prices at the time of the trade but it is by no means guaranteed to be correct.

GeoffTF

Phantom151 said:Bear in mind that nobody publishes data that can conclusively say if it was a buy or a sell as that data is not made available by brokers. You can only take an educated guess by looking at the buy/sell prices at the time of the trade but it is by no means guaranteed to be correct.

That is true. If an investor is making a trade with a market maker, you can make an educated guess as to whether the investor was buying or selling. If a trade was made by two investors in the order book, you cannot say that the trade was a buy or a sell: it was clearly both. Any stock that a market maker buys has to be sold before the price moves too much, and vice versa. Buys and sells balance (though not immediately if a market maker is involved). The fact that retail investors are selling a stock does not mean that it is worth selling. The opposite is probably true more often than not.

GeoffTF

wmb194 said:

GeoffTF said:

It is worth adding that the "dark pools" exist to allow the big boys to trade outside public scrutiny. iWeb has sometimes offered me the option of trading on the LSE or at a better price on "an unregulated exchange".

Brokers sometimes used to show what were their most bought and most sold stocks, A number of studies have found that the stocks that retail investors buy do worse on average than the stocks that they sell. I saw an article that suggested that the likes of Robin Hood get paid for order flow partly because it is valuable to know what the dumb money is doing.

Some still do. De Giro sends a monthly e-mail:

Payment for order flow is illegal in the UK, Canada and most if not all of continental Europe.

That just shows the most traded stocks, and could have come from public information. It does not tell us what Degiro clients are buying and selling. Degiro may not be the best broker for our purposes. We want a broker that attracts particularly dumb clients (to give us any prospect of making money by buying what they are selling and selling what they are buying). Monkeys throwing darts are said to beat professional investors (after costs). We want people who are dumber than monkeys: people who follow the crowd (rather than bet at random). (As I have said, I doubt whether this strategy would be consistently profitable.)

george4064

Go here: https://www.londonstockexchange.com/live-markets/market-data-dashboard/price-explorer

Search for the stock you want, go to trade recap.

Thrugelmir

GeoffTF said:

Thrugelmir said:

GeoffTF said:

I saw an article that suggested that the likes of Robin Hood get paid for order flow partly because it is valuable to know what the dumb money is doing.

Robinhood does not operate in the UK. The regulatory regime in the US is very different. Direct comparisons are as a result meaningless. 

It is true that the studies that found that the shares that retail investors sell outperform those that they buy were not conducted in the UK. Nonetheless, I do not know of any evidence that UK retail investors are more savvy than overseas investors. The article I read implied that it was possible to make a profit by doing the opposite of the retail investors. That is interesting, but I doubt whether it is really the basis of a profitable strategy.

I think you've gone off piste and misread understood my comment totally. The world isn't flat . 

GeoffTF

Thrugelmir said:

GeoffTF said:

Thrugelmir said:

GeoffTF said:

I saw an article that suggested that the likes of Robin Hood get paid for order flow partly because it is valuable to know what the dumb money is doing.

Robinhood does not operate in the UK. The regulatory regime in the US is very different. Direct comparisons are as a result meaningless. 

It is true that the studies that found that the shares that retail investors sell outperform those that they buy were not conducted in the UK. Nonetheless, I do not know of any evidence that UK retail investors are more savvy than overseas investors. The article I read implied that it was possible to make a profit by doing the opposite of the retail investors. That is interesting, but I doubt whether it is really the basis of a profitable strategy.

I think you've gone off piste and misread understood my comment totally. The world isn't flat . 

I thought that was what you had done with your comment, but I was not rude enough to point that out. It is irrelevant how data on retail investor behaviour is collected. My point was that copying typical retail investor behaviour is a bad idea. I was addressing the OP's comment:

"Thanks and this might be a silly question but how can you tell from trades when a stock is doing badly then, for instance many investors want to sell? because it sounds like it will always balance out with people buying it then."

If other retail investors sell, that is no reason for the OP to sell too. If something untoward comes to light, the big boys will know about it first. The bad news will likely be in the price by the time the OP notices that the price has fallen.

adindas

isayhello said:

Thanks and this might be a silly question but how can you tell from trades when a stock is doing badly then, for instance many investors want to sell? because it sounds like it will always balance out with people buying it then.

Any recommendations for news on funds and shares would be great too thanks. 

If this is what you are after you could get this information from charting tools such as Tradingview, Investing.com, Yahoo Finance, etc by observing both trading volume bar and price action in the candle stick chart.

Every share transaction, trading has both buyers and sellers. This is reflected in the trading volume. You could observe whether there is more share bought rather than sold by observing both the price action in the candle stick chart and volume bar. If more investors want to purchase stock price, it goes up green candle and volume clearly indicates it. Where red candle indicates selling pressure increases in the stock.

In the above example SNAP, on the last trading day it is clearly the buyers are in control, the reasonwhy the stock price goes up significantly, as you could observe it from the big green bar in the volume bar and the big green uptrend candle on the price candlestick chart.

If you want to know what price everyone else in the market is buying and selling that same asset for you will need to gain access to what is the so-called the Level 2 access. I do not think you could get it for free without subscription.

Also be aware, like someone else has said a few stocks are traded under "the darkpool". A few stocks woth  more than 50%+ of the float are traded under the darkpool. In this case the volume bar and price action above will not be accurate in the real time as another 50% of the float traded under the darkpool will not be detected.

About stock recommendations, news on funds and shares you could read it from yahoo Finance, Motleyfools, etc.

Unless they are regulated FA, I do not think people could "recommend" you what stock/fund to buy. For this you will need to do your own DDs or seek financial advise.

lr1277

If you want to see all market news, I am sure HL will provide this information. However Charles Stanley direct, on their website have a heading called Markets. Go to this page and at the bottom is a link to 'All Market news' and it gives you just that. I find most of it irrelevant, but it may appeal to you. The thing about news is that for some of it, as a retail trader, you (and I) are too slow to react to it. By the time you do, the share price may have moved significantly.

When you say lse do you mean londonstockexchange.com or lse.com? The latter is London and South East, but also provides financial/stock information. Last year, you needed to register (but not pay) to get to things like share chat etc. But that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. For each share, it also shows the trades in that day (which also Londonstockexchange.com does). I used to read the share chat but eventually decided I couldn't fathom which were the useful posts (a few) and which posts contained noise. There was also ramping up and ramping down of a given share.

I too think the ADVFN site is horrible. However if you want information on a specific share it can be quite good. The share chat is also better than that found on lse.co.uk. To get to it, on Google, in the search box type: ADVFN then the share ticker, e.g. ADVFN AZN. This will take you to ADVFN's page on that particular share.

If you are interested in small cap stocks, Simon Thompson's column in Investor's Chronicle has yielded some winners for me. But obviously you need to subscribe to this magazine.

There is also the Vox Markets Traders cafe website, where Zak Mir runs through suggestions in the small cap space. On his bulletin board pages, he lists his reasons for buying certain stocks 5-6x a week. I have monitored his pronouncements but have only found 1-3 a month are profitable. Take the information he provides as you wish.

I don't particularly look at funds so don't have any information sources for them.

As a generality, the trading/investing you do will partly be determined by how much time you are willing to put into it. 1hr a week, 1hr a day or more than 1hr a day, especially during share trading hours.

HTH.