Dave Barnhart shows how to use Moby Tick's Time & Sales panel to track large trades on SPY. Filter by size, color-code by bid or ask, and scroll back through the day's data to spot big orders and watch when they refresh without moving price.
Chapters
So let's go ahead first and look at time and sales. So what I've done is looking at the print lookup here, we've entered a ticker here, which is the SPY, and we have the normal layout here. Now there's time and sales that's here as part of the chart that you're looking at. So if I click on time and sales, then by default it's, um, all time and sales, and we can see them coming through. All of the trades here. And then you see the exchange and then the bid and the ask, whether it's at the ask, at the bid, between or below or above the ask, things like that. And use— all of that is customizable. So we can see these trades actually coming in. So let's go ahead and edit this. So I'm going to click the 3 ellipses here. Now this is set to all. If I untick all and say I want everything over 100 shares, I can do that. Now we can configure our colors. We have at the ask, at the bid, above the ask, below the bid, in between the bid and ask. And these are for your bid and ask colors. So when we click on the color, you can just pick one of the 16 billion colors that's available, and then you can set that there. You can also choose which columns are visible: the time, the ticker, price, size, exchange, and the bid and ask. And we'll choose submit. So now this, the SPY is filtering for anything that's 100 and over. So if it's moving too quickly for you, like the 1s, the 2s, the 10s, things like that, that's great. The other opportunity, what people do is say, for example, you wanted anything over 5,000 shares. So we can do that and choose submit. Now what it does is Moby tracks the number of trades over 5,000 It keeps that for the day for as far as time and sales is concerned. And what it does here is any trade that comes through that's 5,000 shares or higher, it will show up in the time and sales. So here we see that we have these trades over 5,000, and it's kind of cool here because you can actually scroll down and see because it keeps them in the database for the day, and you can actually scroll down and see which ones were larger. So 20,000 9,800, 7,500, things like that. And also, if you're watching, so you can, you can adjust this to whatever you like. We'll just put this back at all, for example, and you can see how quickly everything is coming in. So the idea of time and sales is quite helpful because you can see large orders come in. You can spot things, something like refreshing, where if you have consistent orders coming in all the time on the bid or on the ask and the price isn't moving You can learn to spot those sorts of things. You can also see real time if big trades come through while you're actually trading. It's good to see where the orders are being placed and executed at the time.
