Adrian Reid shows how to check if a stock is trading normally, halted, or under takeover using Interactive Brokers' TWS Mosaic window. Look for takeover announcements in the newsfeed's stock tab, or spot a takeover by a large gap-up followed by tight trading. A trading halt shows an old chart bar and a halt announcement.
So in Interactive Brokers, when you open up Trader Workstation, which is the local application, not the web kind of interface. So when you open up Trader Workstation, you log in, you can type in the ticker the code of the stock that you want to buy or sell. In the top left in the most, the Mosaic window where you type in the code and you tick buy or sell and you say how many? And all of that. Typically underneath that there's a newsfeed. So you can see it in the newsfeed when you type in the ticker at the top in the newsfeed, the news should switch to be just about that stock.
If it doesn't, there's a couple of tabs on the newsfeed little widget window where it says news about the market, news about the portfolio, news about the stock. Click on the tab about the stock and it'll show you all the recent announcements. And what you're looking for is basically scheme of arrangement or takeover or price sensitive announcements or something like that. And you want to have a look and read them and see if there's any takeovers now that's in the news. But the biggest giveaway is what the price action looks like. So if the stock is moving along, moving along, moving along and then all of a sudden it jumps up and goes in a very tight trading range like this, that's typically what a takeover situation looks like. So a big gap up followed by a very tight trading range. If you see that on your chart in amibroker or in the chart in Interactive Brokers, you want to go dig further and look in the news announcements and make sure if it's an announcement because you're not going to take that trade.
The other type of situation where the stock is not trading normally is the stocks on trading halt. For some reason there's an announcement pending. Now you can't necessarily tell that from Amy Broker unless when you look at the chart, the most recent bar on the chart is several days ago. Right. That's a dead giveaway. But if you're not sure, when you go into Interactive Brokers and you put in a the ticker to get a quote, then.
In the news announcements it's very easy to see the trading halt announcements. So again, you go to the news for that stock and you look down the list and there'd be a trading halt.
And failing that, if the market is open like it's already after 10am and the market's open, when you type in the ticker in the.
To buy the stock it'll have a little C next to the price. C for closed, as in it's not trading. And if it's not trading during the trading day, then it's on hold and something's going on.
