UrmaBlume

A couple of points: First you are getting close, we describe this indicator as: When taken in combination, the acceleration and deceleration of buying and selling volumes, total volume and the velocity/rate of change in the balance of trade reveal a certain dynamic that we find present at many, if not most, intra-session extremes. While these indications occur throughout the session, here are some shots of session extremes from 6/18 in ES. Second there is a very strange dynamic that occurs on the extremes that throws your thoughts about Up/Dn into confusion. This dynamic is not present elsewhre throughout the sesssion and is concerned with auto executions. Here is a shot of the session low and the session high from 6/18. BTW - it makes no difference how TS or anybody else breaks up the volume bars as while the chart is presented on a 1k contract price bar chart the data for the indicator comes from elsewhere. Also BTW RichardTodd - I used to live in Dalls (worked in Lincoln center at LBJ & Tollway) and would love to go back just to eat - The Blue Goose, Snuffers, The Riveria, The Mansion at Turtle Creek, Campesi's, and of course Sonny Bryan's.

Thanks, The indicators are our combined weighted biases and the harmonic of buying and selling. Both of these indicators have been discussed in other posts. The first chart is 8k bars and the second 1k bars on the ES.

Friday's volume and volatility were about 60% of normal. In spit of a dead ass day there was plenty of opportunity. The first chart shows 30 mins of mid session on a dead day with an obvious sell bias. The second chart shows that same 30 minutes of trade and several "TradePoints" at which to either enter or add. A more aggressive approach would be to add and move the stop so it is a matter of scale in, move stop and stop all out. The more you are right the bigger the position and each add is on the house if the stops are managed properly. A 3 tick stop would have kept all the adds in for the whole ride.

In spite of trading at 65% of normal volume and volatility, this new work on bias still offered up several good opportunities during today's session and no serious losers. Below that graph is a shot of the level of intensity at yesterday's session extremes. Bon WeekEnd EveryBody

Thanks. While my publisher is always after more cash flow, our primary focus is to grow our little company. Books help to train and to clarify thoughts but no matter how many you sell its not much money when compared to the revenue from 2 more traders or 2 more bots. Thanks for the kind words. cheers Pat

I have Harris and even my students find him a bit pedestrian. Lots of pages to describe "informed speculator," "bluffer," or "dealer" with nothing much we could find as useful from the standpoint of practical application at a level anywhere near what we find effective. I don't mean to talk down to either you or the book but I come from 30 yrs on trading floors, in dealing rooms and among market makers and Harris comes off to me and those I teach as a bit ABC in a whole lot of pages. My next book is "Practical Short Term Trading - Techniques & Technologies" and I hope to do a better job of covering the material and provide more practical, accessible and useable information. cheers

Out of vogue is a good thing. Neural Networks, Genetic Optimization routines, Bayesian Networks and MARS (Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines) and others are alive, well and making tons of money for the very small percentage of users that have learned how to deploy them. These are the same technologies that allow a missile to defeat a smart pilot in three dimensions at Mach2 - surely when properly applied they should be able to tell you something about the next few minutes of the S&P. As I mentioned before - the concepts and indicators we show here are but inputs to our final layer of processing/technology. To stimulate original, out of box/vogue thought by smart, thinking, ambitous traders like yourself is why I make these posts. In vogue is buschwa like VSA, Wyckoff, price pivot points, candles and other worthless techniques and processing. The public uses these because they lack the ability to grasp anything that has not been publicly discussed or more important, the ability to create their own. If all it took to beat the markets was to spend a few thousand dollars on software and change a few parameters you couldn't get a cab. Using the sameO, sameO is why so many are either blown out or still trading 2 lots after years of trying. No big, continuous trading success that I have ever seen has come from ANYTHING I have ever seen posted on this or any other board and that includes my posts. I know of no such successful technologies that are available for sale, lease or discussion and that includes ours. Inputs, maybe - final layer - no way. cheers

BlowFish, The CFTC criteria have nothing to do with the way we classify commercial trade. We don't designate trade as commercial by who is doing the trading but rather by certain characteristics of the trade. Most of our work is about the timely designation of local points of price inflection which we call Trade Points. We call our little group TradePointTechnologies.com There are certain measureable dynamics present at most of these local turning points. One that I have demonstrated here is our measure of the Intensity of Trade which is one of 4 primary measures that we use to designate a certain price as a TradePoint. The concepts and indicators I have shown here are not our final layer of processing but merely the inputs to that final layer/level of processing/technology. cheers UrmaBlume

Over the weekend one of our beginning/student traders was exploring the practical application of combined and weighted biases as an indicator. A bias can be as simple as a fast moving average of price is above a slower ma or that an indicator of the balance of trade is making higher lows or lower highs. This bright young person ran standard indicators such as the Jurik adaptive moving average, a moving average convergence and divergence based on different speed and phase settings on the Jurik, an adaptive rate of change and a couple of others on price and our indicators of the balance of trade, trade flow, trade instensity and commercial net trade. He came up with about 12 indications of bias in each of 3 different volume frames, posted them to mapped variables. In a volume frame lower than any of the 3 he retreived, combined and weighted all of those biases into one indicator. The purpose here is not to discuss how we calculate bias but to point out that using very basic indicators biases taken from different volume/time frames can, when properly combined and weighted, provide timely indications of a change in the bias of price. I found this person's work to be worthy of note and below is posted about 4 hours from yesterday's trade in ES, times are PST. The originator of this indicator is now using 3 workstations to try and optimize the weights on the 3-4 dozen inputs that make up the indicator. With some hard work and a bit of serendipity, this is how useful trade decision support technologies are born.

Some decades ago I worked at one of only 2 serious firms that did equity trades away from the NYSE. As a broker there I was able to provide a bid or asked to my clients in any NYSE or London stock 24/7, unheard of in those days. At that time we did about 5% of US equity trading off the floor - so it was all "dark pool" trade but was still "printed" on the consolidated tape, albeit sometimes a bit late. Today we look to the behavior of certain derrivatives to reflect this "dark pool" trade. Also worthy of note is that a significant amount of this trade happens outside normal day-session hours. Still another reason to pay attention to the overnight session in such instruments as ES. cheers

Research my previous posts and you should be able to answer most of your questions. But with that in mind - Where did you share anything? You have only made 2 posts to this board and both of them on this thread asking for something. My group is always looking to collaborate with creative thinkers - If you think you have a concept that has value in short term trading and that is your original work and not already known by everybody post it or PM me and we might talk about further collaboration.

Thank you very much for the very kind words. We are a small private trading and trade decision support technology development firm. The indicators posted in this and other posts represent the part of our work that we are willing to show and are used for training our in-house traders. Naturally much of our work and all of our methods are propietary. These posts are made in an effort to stimulate thought and technical explorations beyond candles, rsi, stochastics, profiles, pivots, vsa, wyckoff and other such buschwa. The concepts and indicators we post are our own original work and are not for sale or lease or trial. You can read a bit about our concept basis and mission statement at Trade Point Technologies

There is a huge difference between the volume that is discussed in VSA & Wycokoff and the Balance of Trade which is the basis of this discussion on pressure and the basis for most of my posts.

Easy enough. Either plot candlesticks or use paintbar. OP need a bit of learning on his chosen platform. If this low level stuff is a problem - he faces a bit of a learning cruve before he can access anything that approximates optimal application.

I have been using Trade Station longer than any other customer. The right click, format symbol does work. This is a very basic operation that has been in effect for a very long time. You must have misunderstood support. Here is a chart I just created with several different symbols, all OHLC charts. I changed the colors of the bars via right click - format symbol - style. A paint bar will also color the bar but it is most often use as a conditional change in style. To just change the color a right click is the easiest.

Right click on the price part of the chart - Select "Format Symbol" then select the "Style" tab - from there you can give OHLC bars any color you want.

We still operate in Trade Station even though Ninja & Zen Fire are free because of certain other issues with their data. While I am not prepared to discuss those issues, I will say that I will be delighted when either those issues get resolved or Trade Station takes the granularity of their time stamp down a few levels.

Diablo272, Thank you for the kind words. There is much more to the calculation of our measure of the intensity of trade than just time vs volume. Several of my previous posts on the subject mention some of the additional imputs/filters. As to the ability to calulate, optimize and backtest such ideas - that depends on how you store and retreive your historical transaction data. As to this indicator being quite common - if it were I would not have had to spend the time and money to develop it. Also as to the multi time frame capability in TS it is much better in Ninja as the time stamps in ninja are miliseconds and the zen fire data carries micro second time stamps while Trade Station's time granularity is only down to the minute. We are old-time Trade Station developers and use the Windows Kernel and our own dll's to overcome this lack of time granularity in TS. cheers and best wishes with your efforts

Today's low in the ES was established at 0707 - 0708 PST. From this low at 928.00 the market rallied to a high of 942.00 on a low volume day. The EL collections and the All Data Everywhere libraries in Trade Station allow us to post information from a variety of time frames all on the same chart. The first chart below shows an accumulation of "Buying Pressure" that began some minutes before the low at 0707. This information was posted from a 1 minute chart to this 1k chart which makes, on average, 5 bars for every 1 minute. The second chart is a spike in a multi-faceted indicator that we say has mostly to do with the intensity of trade. It's nice when they confirm each other. I make this post not so much as to brag that we found a low but to point out some of the features of Trade Station. cheers

Blowfish - this is still about volume - it is done on a 1 minute chart so that it can be normailzed for time of day. On several occasions, almost 30 years ago, I spent time at Peter Steidlmayer's ranch near Butte Meadows, Ca. He was my first real mentor when it came to learning the underlying dynamics of what motivates price. In those days there was no online real-time volume data from the futures pit so Peter used time at price to approximate volume and that is the basis of the market profile. Tim Mathers, owner/founder of CQG, was there and that is how CQG got its fame by being first to offer online profiles. While Peter is a great theoretical thinker, he is a huge Luddite when it comes to technology and change. I talked to Peter on Thursday and he is still clinging to his old thoughts about time when it is buying and selling volumes that motivate price, not the passage of time. Today we not only have online volume data but also many intelligent methods and technologies to process that data. What you see in the above charts is what we call our measure of percentage of commitment to the market by longer term (beyond the session) commercial traders, normalized for time of day and presented in several time frames. This indicator is displayed in a different format on our Market Heads Up Display - HUD. Today I am 65 years old and what keeps me feeling young is learning by working/mentoring with a small set of folks that have a technical orientation and are younger, smarter and faster than I am. cheers

We believe that price is motivated/propelled by an imbalance in buying or selling. Further we operate on the basis that it is surges in buying and selling volumes that that create the pressure that drives price throughout the trading session. Even further we believe that this pressure is evident well before moves in price and would like to demonstrate that via Friday's trade. In all of the screen shots below you will see buying pressure represented by blue histograms and selling pressure is red. Further you will see that the peak of the pressure occurs well before the peak or valley in price. We don't use averages, candles, profiles, pivots, rsi, stochastics or any other price based indicators - we use our skills, experience and technologies to try and measure buying and selling in the market place. After all - what could be more fundamental to the motivation of price than buying and selling pressure? If you can measure the pressure, you can predict the move. In this first shot you can see that blue, buying pressure, peaked at around 0610, 20 mins before the open and that within 30 minutes after the open price was up 10 Points. An hour after the open a peak in selling pressure foretold a 6 point drop in price: An hour later a peak in buying pressure propelled price upward and lasted for about 40 minutes before selling pressure manifested itself: Of course the best move of the day started a little over an hour before the close. The move was well foretold by buying pressure and was good for almost 20 points valley to peak.

Indeed, it can be very confusing. When I first started tinkering with this indicator I was expecting to find buying volume at the bottom and selling at the top - instead I found another form of volume/buy/sell/price divergence. As you might know from other posts we use an indicator that is our calculation of session net new trade by longer term commercial traders. Below is a screen shot of a divergence between that indicator and price that proved to be good for 20 S&P points. We think of this behavior on the extremes as just another form of divergence - i.e., lots of selling volume and price not going down. As a fairly accomplished poker player let me say that this game we play is the one true "Big Game," the greatest treasure hunt ever, an honorable pursuit and best of all anybody can take a shot, all you have to be is more right than wrong. When I compare it to poker I say it is a heads up match where there are no antes or blinds, the opponent can never bet, raise or re-raise and must call your every bet and can never fold. You on the other hand can always limit your risk, can bet after you see your hand, can raise and can even re-raise your own bet. Plus maybe ever more valuable is that unlike poker it doesn't get tougher as the stakes increase - if you can beat it for a 2 lot, you can beat it for a 100 lot. good luck cheers

Honvly, I am delighted that you find value in this work. Keep after it - you WILL be rewarded. If the mods would take it as news and not spam, let me say that I am saving some level of detail for my next 2 books "Practical Short Term Trading - Techniques & Technologies" and "Practical Technical Analysis of Price & Volume - a New Era." My publisher is on my ass to get these out so it wont be too long. While these will be available to the public, they are primarily designed to help develop & train our own in-house traders. cheers

They add the last trade so that sometimes the constant volume bar is a little over, if it is an especially big transaction it will print multiple bars at the same time. This has no effect on intensity if you know the true elapsed time, the true volume and apply the proper time of day normalized filters. BTW these filters also must deal with the change in buying and selling volume designation that happens on these extremes - its not just volume/time - there is much more required for optimal performance of this indicator.

Right on Mr. BlowFish. The commercials are the only traders with size & technology strong enough to do this kind of trade and it is this very small percentage of traders who make almost all the money. This is our way of looking over their shoulders as they act. One entity I know does 20,000 ES round turns per week.