The Tradesight Messenger is an RSS and Atom reader that streams news, market updates, and trade calls straight to your desktop. Each Tradesight service that you subscribe to will allow you to see the “feed” for that service. As of July 2012, Twitter users can get the same information by following private Twitter feeds for each of our main services (Stocks, Futures, and Forex) to their phones, desktop, or tablets. You can read more about that here.

In addition, the Messenger has twenty-five news feeds from sources like Fortune magazine, Yahoo Finance, and the Financial Times that you can active to update throughout the day. The Tradesight Messenger is the perfect tool for combining financial information and keeping you up-to-date on what Tradesight analysts are thinking about the markets. The Messenger also provides useful free market news and information if you have registered a username and password with Tradesight.com.

Messenger Installation

http://www.tradesight.com/rss/TradesightMessengerInstaller.exe

PLEASE NOTE: If you have a 64-bit version of Windows, you will need the 64-bit version of Java installed for the Messenger to work. If you do not have 64-bit Windows, you won’t need this. You can get both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Java here.

Just Run it and let it install. Then, you can run it from your Start…Programs…Tradesight Messenger folder. Keep in mind that this new Messenger does not automatically start each time you turn on your computer. You have to start it manually, or you can put it in Start…Programs…Startup, and then it will start each time.

When you run the program for the first time, note the new Tradesight logo and eyeball splash screen. We’ll talk about that when the new website comes up.

You’ll get a Messenger that basically says that no Feeds were found because no username is entered. Just hit Yes or OK.

Now, the Messenger is in front of you. Hit Edit…Preferences and put in your Tradesight username and password under the General option. Hit OK.

You should now see the Feeds for the subscriptions that you pay for, plus something called “Financial Feeds.” More on that later.

Let’s go through some options first.

Hit Edit…Preferences again. You’ll see several items, including General, Tray, Cache, Archive, Browser, and Online Connections. Let’s talk about each of these.

General: There are really only two things here that matter. Your username/password for Tradesight needs to be entered. The “Play Sound Notification with new feed entry” box, which is checked by default. This means that when there is an unread message in your Tradesight feeds, you get a sound. If you don’t want the sound alerts, uncheck that and hit enter.

Tray: Several key options. “Send to tray on minimize” should always be checked. This means that if you hit the minimize button in the top right-ish corner of the Messenger, it will shrink the Messenger to an icon in your system tray. “Send to tray on close” is also checked. This means that if you hit the red X in the top right corner of the Messenger, it will also disappear and still keep running in the system tray. If you UNCHECK this and hit enter, then hitting the red X will close the program completely. “Send to tray on startup” is unchecked. If you check this and hit enter, then when you run the Messenger, it starts only in the System Tray. My suggestion is to leave all of these alone.

“Maximum number of news per notification popup.” The default setting is 5. That means that if you have the Messenger shrunk down to the system tray, a little pop-up will appear when new messages are found, but it will only show up to 5. You can change the number. “Number of seconds to display a notification group” is the number of seconds that the pop-up window will last when new messages arrive. I actually use 10 on the first setting and 5 on the second, but the defaults are the opposite because not everyone uses/has many feeds. Make changes and hit OK.

Cache: Mostly ignore.

Archive: Mostly ignore.

Browser: The default is that everything opens inside the Messenger for you to see complete messages. If you still want to exit to a separate window, you can change this and hit Apply.

Online connections is for people behind Firewalls.

So those are the settings that you can change.

Now, beyond that, in the Messenger, you should see a list of Feeds. When you click on a Feed, you’ll see the last “x” number of messages for that feed. Unlike the last Messenger, it separates things out by Feed. The messages themselves to the right include Date, Time, Title of Messenger, Feed, and soon, Author. If you click once on the message title to the right, you will see the Headline (i.e. the Trade Call or title) appear below. You will see a link underlined in blue below. Clicking on that will bring up the complete message in the Messenger. You can also double-click the Message up top.

Now, how do you set messages to update? Easy, but you have to do this manually the first time.

Right-click on each feed and hit Properties. Change the Update period to “Every Minute” unless you want it to check less often. Hit OK. Do this for each of the Tradesight feeds, and they will check for new messages each minute. Once they are set, you don’t have to do this again when you run the Messenger again as long as you hit File…Exit once and then come back in. This saves the settings.