UrmaBlume

What a lot of buschwa. There is no such thing as an absolute win rate for either poker or the markets. Both the win rate and the variance in both depend on the individual's game not the game itself - duh. UrmaBlume

LOL - Well said - He does indeed take the trite and the obvious to a whole new level.

MMS, I haven't played professionally or in the WSOP in some years. The last time I was at the WSOP was for a book signing. Until recently I did play online PL Omaha tournaments almost every day. Even though I live in Vegas I haven't played in a Vegas room in years becasue online games are so much softer, you can play multiple games, you don't have to toke anyone, you can playing your bathrobe and switch games, stakes, tournaments or casinos with a click. Somtimes this nanny state mentality really pisses me off. I really miss online poker. Not to mention the upwards of 50,000 online players who have lost thier livelehood/job and that doesn't include all the magazines, Ad sales & associated jobs and TV shows etc that have been or will be cancelled or at least downsized. I know one player in California who is over 80 that has been making a modest supplement to his Social Security of around 5k per month but doesn't have the ability to do a 50 mile commute to play in a single game at a cardroom for much reduced potential who has lost his "extra/buffer" and now scratches on SS. Poker is the essence of the American spirit and now online poker is forbidden and in troubled times another 50-100k jobs are lost. In the future and until Online is restored, whenever I am Jonesing for a poker fix I will play some of the small takes tournaments at the Orleans. Very friendly local room and I have won a bunch of their events. Cheers UB

They have entirely new software for Eric's presentations. All based on technologies that express the evolution of market profile theory - locate the drivers of the market & trade with the balance of commercial trade - the software comes from TradePointSoftware.com I couldn't agree more that Eric and his partner are both ethical and knowledgeable about markets in general and derivatives in specific. Their room is, IMHO, a great value and in profile terms = price below value. cheers UB

Tim, Nice Article, Thanks. I too am a fan of Eric Utley. If you have visited TradingAddicts.com recently you will see he has changed his format and now runs the room from charts and indicators that are the next evolution of Market Profile Theory. They are great charts & indicators and his room subscribers get special discounts on the software. cheers UB

Does the book include a guide on the use of the new PSPs & Smart Order Objects in TS 9?

One thing for sure is that without speculators there would be no Traders Laboratory.

Very well said Tams. Speculation provides the liquitidy with out which corporations would not be able to raise capital in the capital markets and withou which both suppliers and users would not be able to hedge in the commodity/interest rate/currency markets. Without speculation the markets could not fulfill their function and without the markets there would not be much of an ecconomy.

Let me know next time you come. There is a great tapas joint near me and I will buy you a drink and some of their amazing stuffed dates (stuffed with a walnut, blue cheese and wrapped in bacon w/great sauce) and a crispy duck roll. cheers pat

Amen - nothing better for an Omaha-8 game than a bunch of holdem players. Or course in Omaha rockets or cowboys are worth so much LESS than they are in Holdem because they come around much more often in Omaha. Aces once every 220 hands in Holdem and once every 39 hands in Omaha. I can only imagine very few hands that I would even play kkxx in omaha,except hands like KKA2s. So many unseasoned Omaha plyers over push AA and some even play AAAx (only game in poker where you look down and see three aces or even 4 aces and its an automatic toss). Please Click to enlarge image MMS - I didn't know you played - ever get to Vegas? cheers UB

If you have never seen such code then that doesn't mean it doesn't exist it could mean that it is just beyond your exposure and experience. I do however assure you that in the institutional trading world there are indeed those who regularly apply self-normalizing intelligent agents to todays data streams - I have seen the code and even written some of it. The use of genetic algorithms and non linear processing in the micro time frame is not at all uncommon at the higher levels of automated institutional/fund trading and all of those applications can record/remember, process, serially normalize and depending on mission and design, exercise a certain amount of reasoning and - all in the millisecond time frame. Of course for someone who can track all 250,000 data points at the rate of 10 per second for 405 consecutive minutes - hats off. With that incredible ability and such powerful inputs as the time pivots of previous day's extremes why would anyone need a quad core. My brain is much too small for such operations and much too slow to do it in the millisceond time frame so I have to resort to writing code to do it for me. UrmaBlume

jurotraderslab, Plainly you have seen a bit deeper into the inside of commercial/institutional technical trading than some others. The last time I checked the ES contract traded about a quarter of a million ticks per day session. This rounds out to about 10 ticks per second. It must take either hubris, a remarkable technical naievte or some of both to, today, be under the assumption that ANY human could "tape read" that many data points at that rate of dissemination and produce useable trade decision support information with any where near the efficacy of any of several blocks of 100 lines or less of C++ that I have seen, and probably you have too. In answer to your questions we have different levels of thresholds of significance for certain markets and certain volume bar sizes. For users of this indicator set we recommend that you start to adjust from a bar size = .0005 * average daily volume. Stocks and some currencys will require further slowing. cheers pat

It is not who is hitting the bids at the low that is the commercial interest it is who is replenishing the bids in the millisecond and microsecond time frame that is the commercial, machine executed interest and it is that replenishment that foms the basis of the local low. UrmaBlume

Here is the formation of today's session low in ES. One interesting point is that sometimes these spikes can give you upt to a 7 minute warning of the session/local extreme. In this case the low, once again, came after the spike and coincidental with a positive price/balance of trade divergence. Users of this indicator report that they often use these divergences to filter false spikes. They execute on the divergence and not on the spike. Sometimes, as is the case here, this signal can allow for a very small stop at the beginning of a 10 point move in just over an hour. After this low was established, the second chart down shows the surges in commercial buying that propelled price for 10 points. Please Click to Enlarge Image Please Click to Enlarge Image Cheers UB

rt-trader, First, thanks for the kind words. TL is a great resource and I am happy to be part of the community. As an aside we tell new users of these indicators who want to trade other markets to put the velocity indicators first on a chart with volume bars of .0005 * average daily volume as a starting place. A very astute question - It is not about how much they do relative to total volume is is that during that very brief time period they were bigger than the market - "fill em up and shut em up." You will notice that spikes on the bottom are made on red/selling volume. What is little known is that the dynamic here is that such spikes, at the lows, happen because the downward momentum that brought price to the lows is met by a bid that is not at any moment bigger than the market but that is being constantly replaced by machine executed orders so that it is the sudden rate/velocity/intensity/one sidedness that turns price. That is how you can have a divergence in the BALANCE of trade and still have the power to turn the market. While day time frame traders do 80%+ on the volume in instruments like ES and the longer termr/value trader does less than the remaining 20%, the value trader/investor is the ultimate arbiter of price because when he come in, for however briefly, he is bigger than the market at that price. cheers UB

The exhaustion in either buying or selling in the V94 indicator is explained in the manual which you can see/download here. cheers UB

No. We do serial normalizations to the point of time of day. We find that beyond that you get into local curve fitting. cheers UrmaBlume

Note the spikes note either the exhaustion or the divergence for 4 trades each woth about 5 pts in an hour: Here are 2 more:

Less than a half hour ago there was a signal of local topping that was good for 5 pts. See the same spike in comercial topping AND the order flow imbalance that was present in previous posts. And then just 15 minutes later we got a commercial buying and Positive Divergence in order flow for a 5 point long - below It is about buying and selling and more to the point, it is about commercial buying and selling. UrmaBlume

Use TradeStation 9.0, you can get a free trial, have an extensive database and even have a smart data object that connects to Excel. Cheers UB

Fair enough, but we also use Net New Trade, order flow and indications of exhaustion to confirm or deny the spikes. cheers UB

You couldn't be more correct. And in some cases they look like these: Some say it can't be done and some said the earth is flat. cheers UrmaBlume

While some technical people find issue with these volumes, you might try using volume data from just the S&P stocks which is available from some data vendors as is the Tick for S&P stocks only. For closer correlation to price activity you can use the S&P only AD line. The premium arb guys often trade simulated baskets that only include the top dozen or so of the 500 by index cap weight. Cheers UB

Of course some indicators CAN sport and classify the most important kind and magnitude of commercial trade (the kind of trade that forms local or session extremes). This indicator does it several times a day. The high of today's trade in ES happened 37 minutes after the open at 0707 PST and the highest reading today in commercial topping activity happened at.......oh yea, the high of the day. This formation of above threshold of significance spike in commercial activity and/or divergence between price and the balance of trade happened again today as it did yesterday and it does on most days. The screenshot shows the High, so far, in today's trade in ES. This kind of trade can be seen by indicators smart enough to register trade that can only be machine executed and only commercial auto execute with such intensity. This formation is not on every extreme but it is on many and the traders I know that use this indicator find it useful. cheers UrmaBlume

Steve, To all those words, I present this simple explanation and this graphic. Today's High in ES was formed at 1206 PST. Like the previously demonstrated high it was formed on a divergence between price action and both the order flow and net commercial trade. In the graph below the middle sub-graph reflects order flow and the bottom sub-graph shows net commercial trade. The divergence between price and the power that moves price is plainly demonstrated. It is not about price action, it is not about volume - It is about the degree to which that trade volume is imbalanced. Please Click to enlarge image Cheers UrmaBlume