The Daily TickEst. 1998 · Amsterdam

Before the blog

History

The Daily Tick's predecessor. Night-Trading.com ran from 1998 to 2005 — one of the first sites with an AEX opening indicator, and for a few years a fixture of Dutch financial press. Everything below is preserved from that era's own site files.

  1. 1998

    Founded

    Night-Trading was founded by a Dutch options trader living in the United States. The goal was straightforward: bring more transparency to options trading. The name came from an eight-or-nine-hour problem — the time difference between Amsterdam and Arizona meant the only time to trade the AEX from the US was in the middle of the night. Night-Trading became the first site to publish an AEX opening indicator, built from the overnight prices of AEX-listed stocks that also traded on Wall Street.

  2. 1999

    Elsevier, ‘Special Beleggen’

    Elsevier's investing supplement covered the rise of online trading in the Netherlands: cheap execution outrunning the banks' risk controls. This screenshot of night-trading.com was kept on file alongside the clipping, and shows the site as it looked that September — real-time AEX-linked Wall Street closes and the site's first opening indicator.

    night-trading.com homepage, September 1999
    night-trading.com, September 1999
  3. 2001

    De Limburger

    A hard year for Dutch investors, the paper wrote in its end-of-year roundup — "tears streamed for many," most looking to make money and instead losing it. "There are exceptions, though you have to look for them. That's where you find John 'USA.' Judgment, but even more nerve and luck, are the ingredients of his success." (translated from Dutch)

    De Limburger newspaper photo
    De Limburger, 22 Dec 2001
  4. 2002

    RTL-Z, live on air

    The same year-in-review line that ran in De Limburger caught RTL-Z's attention. John went on live national television on 2 January 2002 to talk through how he'd read a bad year for everyone else correctly.

    RTL-Z studio interview
    RTL-Z, 2 Jan 2002
  5. 2003

    Stocks & Commodities Magazine

    The November issue of Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities included night-trading.com's work on options open interest: reading the concentration of open contracts across strikes as a signal for where an expiration is likely to pin.

    Stocks & Commodities Magazine, November 2003 cover
    Stocks & Commodities, Nov 2003
  6. 2005

    Acquired

    Night-Trading.com was bought by Wallstreetweb.nl, a Dutch trading portal, in June. The site went quiet under its own name for the better part of a decade.

  7. 2013

    The Daily Tick

    John came back writing under a new name, blogging about ‘stuff that keeps him up at night.’

    Read the archive that followed →

What the site used to do

Every tool here depended on a live server or a Java applet, and none of it survived the move to a static archive. What's left are screenshots of the output.

Candlestick pattern chart
Candlestick scanner58 candlestick patterns, scanned automatically every day across the AEX and a list of Dutch large caps.
Open interest chart
Open interestThe tool behind the Stocks & Commodities piece: open interest by strike, used to estimate where an expiration might pin.
Put/call ratio chart
Put/call ratioA rolling put/call ratio plotted against the AEX itself.
Correlation analysis panel from the desktop application
The engine behind itThe desktop app that generated all of it, screenshotted mid-run. Built in Magik — the same language that, decades later and by pure coincidence, became this author's day job in geospatial software.

Two license plates from the era

Subaru Baja with license plate reading NASDAQ
Nissan 300ZX with license plate reading AEX

Some people wear their trading obsession on a t-shirt.