Last Friday, shares of steelmakers around the world rallied strongly after Mittal Steel, the industry's largest producer, made an unsolicited $22.5 billion cash offer to acquire Luxembourg-based Arcelor, the world's second-largest steelmaker. Such a combo would create a monster company that would control 10 percent of the world's steel production.

Subsequently, the Arcelor board unanimously rejected that proposal, calling Mittal "a corporate raider," but in the meantime the steel industry is in play. All, that is, except the ones under bankruptcy "protection". But, funny, those are under attack by corporate raiders too.

The Dow Jones U.S. Steel Index jumped sharply after the Mittal bid, from about 225 to 235 at the open Friday, and then went higher.

As Bloomberg reported, Nippon Steel Corp., the world's third-largest steel maker, gained +2.6 pct to 440 yen in the following day.

On hearing the Mittal proposal to take over Arcelor, Nippon Steel's president Akio Mimura said that it would try to prevent the company from becoming an acquisition target. "We are contemplating the situation and will take action to ensure the company survives" was the statement attributed to him by Bloomberg.

JFE Holdings Inc., the fourth biggest, jumped +7 pct to 4,310 yen.

Simultaneously, the American Depositary Receipts (ADR) of Posco that trade in Tokyo rose +3.6 pct to 6,600 yen. The South Korean company is the world's fifth-largest maker of steel.

And Australia's biggest steelmaker, BlueScope Steel Ltd., moved up +4.2 pct to A$7.92.

Here is the GICS 15 table for the steelmakers to be found at the top of my website. Click on group 15104050. I see I have to add Mittal (NYSE: MT) and a few others.

I wish I had the time to keep this up. I see I failed to keep up the quarterly reports too. For GICS 15 (Basic Materials), at least you can see how strongly I believed in the gold market last year!

I strongly recommend that you look at the picture of several stocks in an industry before buying and selling because there is a high price correlation, particularly in the interest-rate sensitive, oil-price sensitive and metals-price sensitive markets.

Many of the stocks trade in foreign markets, but this is where ADVFN can help out. They have a free service ("World Markets") that helps you track prices of equities and some other instruments on about 30 markets around the world.

So what you want to do is create a script for each group " like the steels " that links you to current prices, charts, news, etc, for the major stocks.

Nippon Steel, for example, trades on the Tokyo Stock Exchange under the ticker number 5401. You can track it in the overnight market along with its peers overseas and then make some heady decisions early on the NYSE and Nasdaq.

This is what the pros do, and there is nothing to stop Mom & Pop from beating those people to the punch. In fact Mom & Pop probably gets up earlier, doesn't have to take the commuter train to the office, and then go into committee meetings to decide what shares to buy or sell.

Think about it. All you need is info like this to beat those professional fund managers and traders at Humungous Bank & Broker.

Which would bring joy to my heart.

Besides, the pros need any order flow that helps create liquidity. So they want you in the market. They don't care whether a bid or offer comes from the office next door or Mom & Pop sitting at home in Harbin China or Tierra del Fuego Argentina.

As my friends in the HB&B upstairs trading rooms would say, "Bring it on Baby!"

And I can help you do that. :-)