I came across this article by Alan Farley (who I interviewed a while back). In the article he describes his trading desk and how he has things arranged, what subscriptions he has, etc. I’m always interested in hearing how other traders’ have things arranged – I devote a good deal of thought to my trading routine and am always looking for ways to improve it.

What struck me as I read about his setup was how similar it is to mine – from the chart layout even down to the columns I sort by in my watchlist. The other thing that struck me was this quote:

Seriously, though, just a few stocks on a big watch list will trigger decent opportunities during a typical trading day. It’s our job to uncover these hidden gems and to avoid getting eyestrain looking at everything else. Sadly, this is a task at which most traders fail, i.e., they get so overwhelmed by randomness, there’s no brain space left for the real thing.

This underscores the main purpose of your trading desk – to allow you to easily focus on the small subset of data that you can profit from. This is the opposite of a lot of new traders that try to fill up their trading desk with as much data as possible as if they’ll miss something if they don’t cram 20 indicators onto a chart. There’s an infinite amount of data out there that you could look at. Your better off ignoring everything by default and deciding what not to ignore instead of the other way around.

Hat tip to Trader Mike for the article link.

Related posts:

1. The “Late to the Trading Desk” Exercise
2. Unemotional Trading? Impossible.
3. CyberTrader Newsletter Article – Streamline Your Trading Routine Using Automation
4. Trading Using Virtual Desktops
5. Announcing StockTickr/Trade-Ideas Integration