I’m feeling extra generous today, so this week’s Free Trading Tool is actually a two-fer. This week I’m adding PivotFarm’s S/R Levels and Google’s RSS Reader to our kit of free tools.
Just about every trader is aware of some type of calculated level (or levels) for a given market. These levels serve as technical analysis reference points. Some traders build their trading setups on a given set of levels. Often, traders include these levels in the technical studies they add to their electronic charts. Others prefer to be aware of them and just have them handy before, during, and after a trading session. Still others work via a combination of the two methods. I’ve kept levels on my charts before, but currently, I prefer less clutter so I keep the levels off-chart.
PivotFarm.com ES Levels for Aug 21 2009
One of my favorite resources for these calculated levels is PivotFarm’s S/R Levels. I will warn up front that PivotFarm only posts levels for three major US stock indicies, the ES, NQ, and YM. Since the ES is my primary market, this works for me.
For those looking for similar levels on other markets, visit Guy’s site, MyPivots.com, and see if he posts this info for your markets. Wow, you guys just got a three-fer! 
Calculating levels is not hard to do, so there has to be more to PivotFarm than that, right? Correct. You can create a spreadsheet to calculate and track these levels across any number of markets you want to monitor. In fact, we’ll do just that in a future post. I like PivotFarm because along with putting these levels in a very clean, easily readable format, they make it very easy for me to get the information. I can visit their website, I can subscribe to their free newsletter service and have the levels delivered to my email every day, or I can subscribe to their feed using my RSS reader. Personally, the RSS feed is my fav. And that brings us to today’s free freebie: Google Reader.
Google Reader is as easy to use as it is to set up. Login to your Google account, pull up http://www.google.com/reader, find a site with a feed you want to add, grab the URL, click on the Add Subscription button, paste the feed URL, and you are golden. You can also create all the categories you want and then assign feeds to specific categories. Don’t like the native name of the feed? Change it. Once you get it all tweaked to your heart’s content with the feeds you want to follow, you now have a single portal to go to and get caught up on however many sites you like to follow. No more messing with favorites or bookmarks or trying to remember URLs or any of that mess. For sites you can follow in RSS. This really makes staying current on all the topics that interest you a lot simpler.
Go have some fun and get familiar with PivotFarm, MyPivots, and Google Reader.
Update: In case having three options for getting your daily PivotFarm fix wasn’t enough, I felt compelled to share a fourth: PivotFarm on Twitter.
