Build Your Own Bloomberg-Killer
The Bloomberg Terminal is the de facto standard machine for any professional working in finance. And it doesn't come cheap, costing about $1,600 per month. Make one yourself for under $1000.
Real-time news and updates
The Fly On The Wall; For $65 a month, you can get all that The Fly On The Wall offers, including Fly News, Syndicate, and Events. With this subscription, you get a nice little web-based window that feeds you live news and market data. It's very customizable and you can set various alerts to trigger when a company in your portfolio is doing well (or failing miserably). The Fly usually beats the major wires and CNBC by a few minutes, sometimes as much as 10.
Trade On The News; Trade The News is very similar to the previously mentioned Fly On The Wall, but it's also more expensive, costing anywhere from $50 to $500 a month for a subscription depending on what you want. Its Global Equities coverage is a 24-hour real-time news portal for anything and everything related to stocks. You'll get breaking market alerts on everything from technical activity to IPO offerings to government decisions.
Cyborg Trading - HFT for amateurs; Cyborg Trading is a pioneer in its field. It's trying to bridge the gap between the professional trader and amateur investor by allowing the smaller players to get into the game of algorithmic and high-frequency trading. For a couple hundred a month (varying price plans for various needs, obviously), you can have access to algorithm-building tools and advanced liquidity systems that let you trade like the bots do.
Analyst research
Check out sites like FT Alphaville , The Money Game and ZeroHedge to see what insiders are saying.
Charts, charts, charts
There's no shortage of these at websites like Yahoo! and Google Finance, but one of the best free solutions out there is a site called Finviz.com (that's short for Financial Visualizations). Finviz has everything from Forex to Futures to Commodities to Equities and way more, all wrapped up in a easy-to-navigate website with endless options for customizing your graphs.
