Introduction
Welcome to BigShort, your edge in navigating today’s fast-moving financial markets. If you're new to trading or just getting started with BigShort, you're in the right place.
This guide is designed to help first-time users get up to speed quickly. You’ll learn how to navigate the platform, understand its core features, and use our indicators to identify real trade opportunities. BigShort simplifies complex market data into clear, actionable insights. Even if you're new to trading, you'll be able to make informed decisions with confidence.
We’ve organized everything into clear, easy-to-follow sections so you can move at your own pace. There’s no jargon or guesswork. You’ll find practical guidance to help you build confidence and act. By the end of this guide, you’ll be equipped to interpret market signals, build your own watchlists, and execute trades using BigShort’s data-driven approach.
Reminder: BigShort staff will never DM you on Discord to solicit anything. If you get a DM from BigShort staff, it is a scam!
Reality Check
Before digging into all the great tools in BigShort that can help you get on the same playing field as institutions, there are some realities at play you should be aware of, and embrace fully.
BigShort doesn’t give you binary green and red arrows to tell you when to trade. There’s no system on the planet, especially for retail traders, that can do this. The more you keep looking for that, the further away from profitable trading you are.
While BigShort has simplified many complex variables down to human-readable form, capital markets are still multi-dimensional and incredibly dynamic beasts. You can’t expect to start making millions using BigShort on Day 1. It’s going to take some time to learn and master. You may even be lacking some fundamental baseline knowledge. If that’s the case, it’s going to be very difficult to understand everything BigShort has to offer, so please be real with yourself and focus on fundamentals like Price Action if needed!
If you’re willing to put in the time and effort, BigShort can help you become reliably profitable. If you’re not willing to put in the effort, feel free to cancel your subscription now and we wish you all the best.
What’s special about BigShort anyway?
BigShort is fundamentally different from a set of indicators you get on TradingView or other trading platforms with data offered by your broker. Let’s start by diving into the conventional retail trading platform/broker.
Retail Broker data
99% of the time, your stock broker only provides OHLCV data (Open High Low Close Volume) data. Therefore any indicators built into these platforms can only be based on this data.
Indicators based on broker OHLCV data (MA, RSI, ATR) can only look backward—averaging data from past bars.
By the time they signal green, the ship has often sailed.
BigShort shows you what's happening NOW
What actually moves markets?
At any given time, prices will be going up or down. Why? To oversimplify, if price is going up, it means Buy orders are being placed more aggressively than sell orders.
This is referred to as Order Flow; all the market, limit & stop orders being placed, cancelled or filled.
This ‘Level 2’ and ‘Level 3’ data is available from the exchanges with an institutional price tag. Understanding the Order Flow in real time of both spot and derivatives markets can clarify moves as they’re happening, vs the move’s first candles being averaged down by candles that happened an hour ago.
So I just need L2 data?
So I just need to subscribe to L2 data from the exchange and watch the order flow? What do I need BigShort for?
Well first off, that’s going to cost you $2,000-$5,000/mo for stock data, and another $5k for options. That’s before the AWS hosting costs to process all the data.
Second, we’re talking about several gigabytes of binary data per day. Instead of $136.69 per share, you’d see
001100010011001100110110001011100011011000111001
Imagine seeing 10,000 lines of that per second..
It’s impossible for a human to interpret the thousands of quotes, cancels, fills, etc. that are happening in real time. There were 2,996,325,705 filled orders in equities exchanges in Oct ‘25 alone.
This is where a solution like BigShort is critical for its ability to process the raw data and perform calculations that translate to human-readable visual indicators.
We will explain in detail throughout this guide all the juicy institutional-grade leading indicators in BigShort.
Buckle the $#%@ up.