IG Index / IG Markets

IG Client Sentiment Analysis

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IG client sentiment is an indicator that IG Index provides to show what percentage of clients have long or short positions.

For example looking at the NASDAQ index, we can currently see that 56% of clients are long this market and 44% are short:

NASDAQ IG client sentiment

A general consensus is that this is often a “contrarian” indicator, clients try to short when the market when it is going up and go long when the market is going down.

The Excel Price Feed Add-in provides historical client sentiment data which you can download into Excel. You can then combine this data with historical market data to see how client sentiment changes as the market changes.

Here is a chart of long client sentiment (the orange line) versus market daily close (the blue line) for the S&P500 Index over the past 4 months:

S&P500 IG client sentiment

There does appear to be a correlation, as the market moves up client long positions moves down – clients are moving from long to short positions as the market goes up.

Then at the peak (early September) client positions were long just before the market started dropping.

As the market moved down (i.e. for the past month) clients stayed long.

This example shows that client sentiment data can be used to provide trading signals, especially at “turning points” in sentiment. Obviously this would need to be tested against different markets but it is definitely a useful tool when looking for trading opportunities.

Building an IG Index watchlist in Excel

andysinclair2 Comments
Excel Price Feed Streaming Watchlist

IG Index / IG Markets provides over 16,000 different markets to trade, including FX, stocks, indices, commodities and cryptocurrencies. Keeping track of potential trading opportunities within this universe is daunting, you really need a way to filter out which markets you are interested in and monitor just those markets.

This is where watchlists can help.

They help you focus on only the markets that interest you and help quickly give you an overview of the overall financial market. For example, I like to monitor a watchlist of major stock indices, currency pairs and commodities. This is especially helpful when I first arrive at my desk in the morning and want to get a quick overview of global market sentiment.

Brokers, such as IG Index, provide basic tools for building watchlists, for example here is an extract from one of my watchlists on the IG website:

IG Web Platform Watchlist

This watchlist is fine for keeping an eye on a small selection of fields such as % day change but what if you want a more customized watchlist, with filters, sorting, visualizations, custom formulas etc?

This is where the Excel Price Feed Add-in comes in.

You can use the power and customisation of Excel using formulas and visualizations together with the live market data formulas provided by the Add-in to build your own watchlist in Excel.

For example, we can use the daily high and low price to calculate the daily range and visualize where the current price is within the daily range.

In the example below I can see that the current level of the S&P500 is near the high of the daily range (83%) and the range today is 70 points:

We can add more markets and more data, including client sentiment, to give us a live view of the market, highlighting the data we are interested in:

At a glance we can see that the major stock indices are little changed on the day and towards the high of their daily ranges. We can also see that the main mover today is the cryptocurrency Ether.

Using Excel like this we can track and compare markets exactly the way that suits our trading style. Once we have setup our spreadsheet it is updated automatically with live market data so it always gives us a live view of the market.

Download Excel Price Feed today and try it for yourself.