Market Club - Review

In the June newsletter I spoke about a new service from INO, called Market Club, and how their “giant footprint” system was helping me get a head start in longer term trading.

The piece sparked a lot of interest, and many questions. In an effort to answer those and give you a better insight into the whole offering, I present this review of the Market Club service. The review is timely, because a new version of the system has just been released, offering even more speed, symbols, and features.

Overview

Once signed up for Market Club, you access the services through their website. The applications are Java based, which means you can use them from any PC or Macintosh. It also means no software to install on your computer, and instant updates any time upgrades are released.

There are four main sections on the site:

Chart Portfolio
Smart Scan
Trade School
Data Central

I’ll walk through each in turn…

Chart Portfolio

This is a fairly standard portfolio and charting application. The java charts are, I must say, very nicely presented – no unnecessary clutter on the screen. It took me a while to figure out how to find some forex symbols, but that’s probably because I’m adverse to reading help files! Once I did check the help, it became embarrassingly easy!

Charts are available from 1 minute up to daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Line, bar, and candle varieties are all offered. There are currently thirteen studies available, with more promised. I found everything I needed was there – CCI, RSI, MACD, and the usual array of moving averages and stochastics – enough to keep most people happy.

You can add any combination of these as takes your fancy. When you’ve got a chart setup that you’re happy with, it can be saved as a template for future use. These are saved on the server, so even if you access the system from another computer you will be able to see your templates – an advantage of web based systems like this.

With over 110,000 different symbols to choose from, most things can be charted. Stocks, futures, forex, and metals are all there. There is an example chart a little later in this review.

Smart Scan

This is the “killer application” of Market Club, it’s where you can quickly find good trading setups.

You start by picking the type of instrument you are interested in trading (stock, future, or forex), the type of chart you like to use (line, bar, candle, or a table if you prefer the raw numbers), and you click the Scan button.

After a couple of seconds (my internet connection is slow, but this but still only takes a couple of seconds), you see a whole list of charts that are possible trading setups. How is that determined? Well, a number of different ways. The default, is to look for strong DMA (daily moving average) trends. However, you can also scan for 1, 3, 4, and 52 week highs, lows, and weak DMA trends.

Once you have these charts, any or all of them can be automatically analysed, using Market Club’s ultra simple giant footstep system. At this point, I need to step out of the scan part and talk a bit more about this system.

Giant Footsteps

The core of Market Club’s offering, is their automatic chart analysis, which finds strong up and downtrends. The idea is simple – the system looks at five criteria for the symbol in question Each of these is assigned a score. When added together, the symbol’s score will be between +100 and –100, meaning strong uptrend or strong downtrend.

The five different criteria carry different “weight” depending on the sort of trader you are. For example, if you are a short-term (swing) trader, the second and fifth numbers making up the score are the most important.

When a score is sufficiently strong enough, it is flagged as a “giant footprint” – ie a potential trade setup. It is important to note that these giant footprints are not buy and sell signals in themselves, but are a form of indicator, albeit a very powerful one. As with any other indicator, it should be confirmed with other signals for entering a trade.

The ‘footprints can be applied to daily, weekly, and monthly charts, giving short, medium, and long term trends. A possible simple trading system then, might be to wait for the long and medium term ‘footprints to line up in the same direction, and then take short term ‘footprints in that direction as entries and exits. This actually works surprisingly well. Of course, any number of systems can be built around these ‘footprints using any number of indicators.

So getting back to the Smart Scan screen…once all the charts resulting from the scan are in front of you, they can instantly be analysed to see their score, and if any of them are flagged with a footprint. This makes finding possible trades in any market a doddle – there’s almost always something somewhere that’s moving.

Here’s an example chart of September Corn, which came up in a scan showing a giant footprint due to it’s +100 score, meaning a strong uptrend.

From this screen, a button click brings up the full chart, from where 19:02 16/07/2005any amount of further analysis can be carried out to confirm the trade – or otherwise.

Trade School

This part of the site offers some thousand hours of audio educational material for the trader, supported by hundreds of downloadable workbooks. The material is supplied by the likes of Linda Raschke, Mark Cook, Robin Dayne, and more.

This is a useful learning resource, although INO offer a much bigger library through their InvestorFLIX DVD rental service.

Data Central

The last section is a data download service, offering CSV files of the 110,000 supported symbols. If you are into back testing or off-line analysis, this will be of use.

Conclusion

The charts are pretty, but nothing outstanding. The educational material is a nice to have. The real selling point of Market Club is undoubtedly it’s Giant Footsteps indicator, and the scanning system. This really does make finding trades a breeze.

It’s not a day trading system, although you could certainly use it as a filter for choosing the direction of day trades. But to get the most from it, the system should be used for trades lasting a few days and upwards.

The cost for a year is around $350, but if you decide it’s not for you, you can get a full refund at any time during the first month, which makes trying it out effectively free.

I'm really enjoying using Market Club. The trend indicator and scanner give me new ideas almost every day. If you are interested in holding your trades for more than a day, it's definitely worth a look.

UPDATE: Market Club have added new features since this original review. See My New Updated Market Club Review Here

Resources

Market Club Website