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Everything posted by UrmaBlume
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The ability to recognize the formation of local and session extremes in time to take advantage of the information is key to intra-session success. Maybe this thread could become a discussion and demonstration on how we colletively recognize local and session extremes. Day to Day so many of these local/tradeable extremes form the same way with regards to commercial activity and order flow that the ability to recognize them in real-time might offer value to astute traders. While it was not a huge trade Today's price and trade flow action in ES at 0732 -0742 PST provided a text book shot of the face of many local and session extremes. The first shot below is of an 8k chart showing between the vertical blue lines 0732 -0742 the formation of a top or maybe a continuation. The second chart below is of a 1k chart that shows the same period of trade. In this chart you can see strong commercial topping activity at 0372 as 0741 the chart reflects a double top with strong divergence between where price is and the power that put it there/negative divergence. This top was only good for a few points and may not be a session high (good for over 2 hours at this writing) but it is a pattern that repeats itself through these indicators multiple times every week. These charts demonstrate 2 components of many local highs and lows - Strong opposing commercial activity and a divergence in the comparison between price and the relative strength of the order flow that put it there. 8k Topping 1k confirming top w/strong opposing commercial activity and price order flow divergence Cheers UB
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There were indeed spikes at 0700 & 0721 Pst but they were below the threshold of significance for the normalized rate of trade for that time of day. The spike reposted below was not at 0734 but was at 0934 PST. The chart was not cheery picked as there was only 1 spike of anywhere near that magnitude on 5/31and that spike formed the session low. Only 1 low and only 1 spike like that on the day, nothing to cherry pick. On this particular indicator it was by far the biggest spike of the day. You do not get such spikes every local or session extreme but when you do and when they are of such magnitude they are usually, like this one, very tradeable. Also you might notice that the spike is confirmed by the extreme selling exhaustion noted by the V94 window in the bottom sub-graph. cheers UrmaBlume
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More important than noting past areas of support and resistance by price is locating strong, sudden buying or selling by commercial/value/longer term traders. These are the guys that drive price in the time frame longer than the day time frame. The good news is that they can not hide the strength, one-sidedness or velocity of their transactions and thus can be detected as they establish local and session extremes. Today was no exception. At 0934 PST there was a huge but very short-lived spike that established the low of the day at the low price tick of the day and gave 30 seconds before prices rose dramatically. Changes in price are a result of an imbalance in commercial trade and spikes like the one below that perfectly demonstrated today's low tick are not obviated by any version of the profile - yet the design for them is completely based on profile theoy. cheers UrmaBlume
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Very interesting silentDUD, If, as you say, it is "exactly the same output" as your work, then you have no need to see mine and you can just post yours for us all to test- lol. UrmaBlume
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I couldn't agree more and thanks for the kind words. Price is and has never been as much of an indicator of future prices as is the degree to which trade is imbalanced plus the degree of commercial participation in that imbalance. So many often ask about the big price movements on very little total volume during the night session. They occur because night trade is almost all commercial trade and all of that trade is usually on the same side thus - no significant opposing activity. If the book, depth of market, is grossly out of balance, big price moves on little total volume will be the result. This explains why higher than normal volume does not necessarily confirm a move but can signify the presence of opposing trade. This is confirmed by the fact that the days that have the biggest price moves do not have as much volume as strong key reversal days, i.e., both long term/value buy and seller present. This dynamic is often demonstrated on local and session extremes when the momentum of day/local trade runs into unlimited opposing trade. At the formation of these extremes there is usually not a big amount of trade as compared with the high volume prices of the day but the transactions occur at a greatly increased velocity as price momentum day traders run into an unlimited stream of auto orders placed by "house" value traders. Another interesting point about the formation of these extremes is that many bottoms are formed by trade on the bid. This is recorded as selling volume by most data vendors and is the one point where thay are wrong. The explanation is that momentum has run into stronger opposing activity, that the activity is conducted by commercial traders and that is confirmed by the facts that 1) that the velocity of trade is such that it can only be conducted by machine ordered trade and 2) even though the trade is on the bid prices don't continue down, price in fact reverses because the bid is bigger than the market. All of this happens in the second or sub-second time frame and yet the total volume of the event that establishes the extreme is but a fraction of the total volume done on the high volume price of the day. Of benefit to stock index futures traders is that many time when this activity occurs it happens in all of the major index futures at exactly the same time. This is a great confirmation that the reversal is real and is demonstrated in the chart below which shows blue/buying volume spikes across NQ, ES & YM that formed a session top - tops formed on an exhaustion of buying and bottoms formed on an exhaustion of selling at a very high velocity and density of trade. Again, thanks for the kind words and when you have a minute if you still have my phone number please give me a call or PM me with yours, I have some new, unpublished work I would like to show you. cheers pat
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Prices do not support, provide resistance or propel price. Buying and selling, the order flow, the balance of trade provides support, resistance and the motivation to price. Price is no more, no less and is exactly the response to buying and selling, i.e., order flow.
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Thank you for the kind words. It is not volume that drives price. It is an imbalance in that volume that drives price - that is how you can get such big moves on such small volume during the night session.
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Market Profile Theory as taught by Peter Steidlmayer at week long seminars at his ranch on the Feather River in Northern California in the early 80's is classic and completely valid today. The market profile as a tool or as trade decision support technology is dated, almost useless and made completely obsolete by modern technologies. The first change to obsolete the profile graphic as a tool was the availability of online volume. In those days there was no online volume from the pits and to see volume you had to wait until the end of the day and download it from a database sponsored by the CBOT. Today everybody can see the size of every transaction and further can see the motivation of the transaction. Peter taught that to trade successfully one only needed to understand and be able to quantify the order flow, the balance of trade, recognize the footprint of the value or longer than day time frame trade and be able to spot and classify commercial trade. His idea then and it seems very much true today was that it was the value/longer term or commercial trader turned the market. That this group of traders actually did less volume than the day time frame trades but than when they appeard the turned/established the extremes in the market. This was demonstraded as fact almost every day in the Liquidity Data Bank reports from Cisco futures. The report issued each night showed the volume at each price along with the degree of commercial participation. It was and is a constant today that the more significant the extreme, the greater the rejection at the extreme the greater the commercial particiaption. Then as it is today in commodities there are long term, size natural buyers and sellers. The sellers are usually the producers that see a high price they would like to capture. The buyers are users who come in with much vigor when they believe the price to be cheap and that have the opportunity to hedge against rising prices. For years Southwest Airlines was profitable when so many other airlines were not solely because of their hedging/forward buying agains the rising price of fuel. He made the further point that very seldom was the commercial/longer term buyer present on the same day as the seller. That day time frame trade would auction up to find the loner term/value seller and down to find the buyer. Today's commercial/value trade is most often executed by algorithms that go to great pains to disguise their trade. They can hide their intentions but they cannot hid the fact of their transactions. Operating in the millisecond time frame there are indicators that can spot this trade as being conducted at a velocity, size and agressiveness that only commercials are capable of. Retail traders do not trade size and they do not operate in the millisecond or microsecond time frame. A running tally of Net New Trade can track both order flow and the balance of trade. When the NNT line is flat, trade is balanced. The greater the slope the greater the imbalance and the net is the balance for the session. This indicator is very good at demonstrating divergences between the velocity of price and the power of the buying and selling beneath it. Some scalpers can project the values of the next bar from the price action and balance of trade in the current bar. Useful when contemplating and entry or exit. Cheers UrmaBlume These concepts and indicators are part of a growing technical evolution of Market Profile Theory. Market profile as a theory is classic, alive and thriving. The market profile graphic as a technology is dated and being replaced by an evolving technical base.
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Of course there are additional variables, but none of them have anything to do with price. From time in the pits and time studying under Peter Steidlmayer almost 30 years ago, I learned and believe to this day that order flow and the balance of trade are key to anticipating change in the market. Now while the pits are no more and there are no outstretched hands to define order flow, there are certain sets of indicators that can provide the same information. Almost all of our software development is about what we call the "Technical Evolution of Market Profile Theory." In the graph above you can see that regime change came to the harmonic BEFORE it came to price and without non-linear processing and intelligent agents that is virtually impossible with only price as inputs. "As buying and selling displace each other in harmony (the graphic) so is price displaced. The definition of simple harmonic motion is simply that the acceleration causing the motion a of the particle or object is proportional and in opposition to its displacement x from its equilibrium position. The geometric representations of price you referenced measure result and not cause. Our work attempts to measure the motivator/force and thus predict result. That's the difference." If trade was always in balance then price would never change. The movement of price is almost always a response to an imbalance in trade. cheers UrmaBlume
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That indicator is part of a package we use to calculate and trade Order Flow and The Balance of Trade as discussed in this post here on TL. In that post the indicator is described as: V94 Window !TPS.V94Window is an indicator designed to report a moving window of net buying and selling volumes – a moving window of the balance of trade. The small dots are the raw values smoothed by DX2MA. They are in a channel. The large fat +’s show extreme levels of buying or selling. In some cases they can signal exhaustion and warn of a reversal as is the case with the selling in the chart above. In other cases they can signal extreme activity and the likelihood of continuation as with the buying in the chart above. cheers UrmaBlume
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The horizontal lines in the screenshot below represent the Open, High and Low from the current session as well as the session highs and lows from the previous 4 days. The logic is that a session extreme is where the price action ran into enough opposing activity to create and hold that extreme price for at least the rest of that session and what could be a better definition of S/R? The larger red and blue dots are today's extremes and the smaller red and blue dots are highs and lows from the previous 4 days. In the ES and especially over the last few weeks when there has been so much overlapping price action, it is amazing how often price will pause, be supported by or reverse at these lines.
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Order Flow & The Balance of Trade - Then & Now
UrmaBlume replied to UrmaBlume's topic in Technical Analysis
Thanks Blowfish. It has been a while and it is great to see all the improvements in TL. While almost all of our trading is based one way or another on our read of Order Flow and The Balance of Trade as described above, method alone will not produce optimal results. The method can answer the how to trade but doesn't deal with WHAT to trade. We use scans that normalize price and volume data into percentages of normal behaviour and sort for out of sequence high relative local price volatilities as well as unusually high relative trade volumes. It takes an unusual commitment of capital to produce higher than normal relative trade volumes and it take an out-of-sequence imbalance in that trade to produce unusually high local price volatilities. Either or both can spell opportunity. These scans were taken on the close Monday. Times are PST. Trade What's Hot and Leave the rest for other traders. This particular scan shows the top 10% of stocks of the TPT400 Stock Index sorted by local price volatilities over a 60 minute time segment. This particular scan is shows the top 10% of stocks of the TPT400 Stock Index, sorted by relative trade volume over a 60 minute time segment. This scan shows a run just after Monday's close on 34 popular US Futures contracts. This kind of scanning can keep you trading what's hot and not trading what's not. This particular scan is shows popular Forex pairs as traded in the US and sorted for local price volatility. -
Traditionally the discussion about harmonics and trading has been about geometric drawings of price with no reference to volume or the balance of trade. The Harmonic we use has price as NO part of its calculation and is a representation of the force that drives price - the cause instead of the result as per: "One definition of simple harmonic motion is simply that the acceleration causing the motion a of the particle or object is proportional and in opposition to its displacement x from its equilibrium position. As buying and selling displace each other in harmony (the graphic) so is price displaced."
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Success in the markets is not about instinct, divine inspiration or spontaneous intellectual combustion. It is about intelligent data processing, sound method and the management of risk and resource that is both effective and adaptive to change. Information = Equity We look at the fact of a transaction as creating a particle of data – the tick. Ticks are the atoms of market information. Each tick carries with it the sub-atomic data particles of time/date, exchange, price, bid/asked and the size of the transaction. It is the sum of these particles of information that represent the price/time/volume continuum that is the essence of every market. We operate under the premise that it is not price itself or the passage of time that motivates the movement of price, but rather it is the occurrence of trade, more specifically it is an imbalance between buying and selling within that trade that motivates the movement of price. While some previous individual posts have contained some of what is below, this is an effort to collate ideas and technologies that deal with classic technical analysis in so far as order flow and the balance of trade is concerned. Order Flow & The Balance of Trade In the days of open outcry and pit-trading the biggest advantage pit traders held over the public and other off-the-floor traders was that they could see the order flow/balance of trade in real time as it was being created. In those days the liquidity/order flow either came from orders being received by the phone banks that surrounded the pits (retail trade) or from traders in the pit that represented the large trading houses (commercial trade). Whether in the pits or on the phone banks, a trader would signal his desire to buy by showing both hands with palms inward and with one hand indicating price and the other indicating his size. Palms out to sell. New traders quickly learned to know and recognize the traders that executed on behalf of the big trading houses. They learned that when these guys put their hands out that they usually had size to do and that their size was oftentimes enough to create a local if not a session extreme. A trader could look at the phone banks and see brokers from all the major houses signaling their phone orders to the pit. If the trader saw a sea of palms he knew that the public was selling, if he saw mostly the backs of the traders’ hands he knew the public bias was buying, if it was mixed, then there was not much commitment either way on the behalf of the public. The same for the house traders, except that today traders that do that kind of size trade from all over the world and the trade that forms those local and session extremes is often executed by computers that issue those orders in a stream separated by milliseconds or even microseconds. Today no one can see the traders’ hands because the pits are no more, plus the more sophisticated the trader, the greater his efforts to disguise his intentions and his size. The good news for traders is that there is a family of indicators that track, define, report and demonstrate both order flow and the activity of certain aggressive and influential trading entities. The Velocity of Trade In the more active and more liquid markets many local and sometimes even session extremes are indicated by spikes in the velocity of buying volume, selling volume or total volume. It appears that much of this trade is machine executed and sometimes in equities seems to be precisely coordinated over more than 1 market. The size commercial traders of yesterday have been replaced with algorithms that issue and execute orders in the millisecond or even microsecond time frame. Operating in the millisecond time frame this Velocity of Trade indicator is designed to spot just this trade – it is too fast to be conducted by humans. Of note in the charts below is that tops seem to be associated with blue (buying) and bottoms with red (selling). In those instances which are often seen in the market in real time, our interpretation is that with the blue bars at the top, buying has run into a continuously replenished asked whose size is bigger than the current demand and buying is exhausted, thus creating a local top. A demonstration of the old floor adage of “FILL THEM UP AND IT WILL SHUT THEM UP.” The chart below shows the spikes in the velocity of trade that formed a strong local high in all 3 major equity index futures. Note that the top is formed on blue (buying) volume so it represents a kind of buying exhaustion. Also note that these spikes occurred within seconds of each other. The next 4 graphs show highs and lows in ES, Soybeans and 10yr T Notes as formed by the spikes in the velocity of trade. !TPS.TVHarmonic4L One definition of simple harmonic motion is simply that the acceleration causing the motion a of the particle or object is proportional and in opposition to its displacement x from its equilibrium position. As buying and selling displace each other in harmony (the graphic) so is price displaced. !TPS.TVHarmonic4L is an indicator designed to demonstrate a moving window that reflects the surges in certain buying and selling volumes throughout the session. It is applied to volume bar charts only. The volume bar setting that produces the best result varies with the speed of the market. The solid Blue line represents an approximation of buying volume and the red – selling volume over the width of the moving window. The line is smoothed by the TPS.DX2MA function at the SlowDX2MA Speed. The red +‘s and the blue +‘s are the same raw value as above but smoothed by the FastDX2MA. The color changes in the plus signs as shown by the red and blue arrows in the graph above are designed to show a change in bias or the buying and selling in the market at that time. Red +‘s indicate a selling bias and the blue +‘s indicate a buying bias. The efficacy of this indicator is significantly affected by the symbol choice, the volume bar setting, the WindowWidth setting and the DX2MA speed settings. Often times a very “ugly” chart can be made to resemble the chart above by a change in settings and at other times an “ugly” chart just reflects a disordered market condition. %Bar Complete & %Bar Bias !TPS.%BarComplete is a ShowMe indicator that when applied to volume bar charts plots the percentage of completion of last bar on the chart. This figure is plotted in blue opposite the midpoint of the bar. The “7.9%” displayed above shows that the bar is only 7.9% complete and has just opened. If this were an 8k bar and 4k contracts had traded the reading would be 50%. !TPS.%BarBias is a ShowMe indicator that when applied to volume bar charts plots the percentage of buying and selling volumes so far in that bar. In the bar above the red 52.3% indicates that at that point 52.3% of the volume, so far, in that bar is selling volume and that the remaining 47.7% is buying volume. This information can sometimes give a bit of a lead when contemplating an entry or on the formation of local or session extremes. Net New Trade The Net New Trade indicator, !TPS.NetNewTrade is plotted in the lower sub-graph in the chart above. In the example above one can see that the higher highs and higher lows in NNT confirm the up-trend in price. !TPS.NetNewTrade calculates an approximation of the cumulative net/balance of buying and selling volumes in the market. NNT can be configured to reset itself to zero at the beginning of each trading sessions. The small red and blue dots report the raw value of NNT smoothed by our DX2MA series smoothing function. The dashed lines form a channel around the smoothed value of NNT and the width of the channel can be set via an input. The small red and blue + signs note the raw value of a new session high or new session low. In addition to confirming trends, divergence between price and !TPS.NetNewTrade, as shown in the chart below, can be of some significance. V94 Window !TPS.V94Window is an indicator designed to report a moving window of net buying and selling volumes – a moving window of the balance of trade. The small dots are the raw values smoothed by DX2MA. They are in a channel. The large fat +’s show extreme levels of buying or selling. In some cases they can signal exhaustion and warn of a reversal as is the case with the selling in the chart above. In other cases they can signal extreme activity and the likelihood of continuation as with the buying in the chart above. Price Center Stripe !TPS.CenterStripe is to be applied to price on volume bar charts. The small red and blue dots are the midpoints of each price bar smoothed by DX2MA. The channel that contains these price dots can be expanded to channel the bulk of price activity, not just the dots. The RDots are the round dots posted above and below pivot highs and lows. These are the standard TradeStation pivot points and their strength setting is one of the inputs to this indicator. These dots plot after the fact. The SDots shown as “fat” + signs in the graph above are special reference dots. These dots reference price, price pivot points and Net New Trade and can be very useful in a strongly trending market as shown above and be very expensive if acted upon in noisy sideways markets. SDots are plotted in real time. The indicators shown above are but a subset of a family of new technologies that are designed to make available to the trading public the same level of information available to floor traders in days past. !TPS.5DayHiLo !TPS.5DayHiLo plots the current day’s open, high and low plus it can also plot both the high and the low for the 4 days previous to today. It was selling that formed these highs and buying that formed the lows. Sometimes that buying or selling will reappear at the same price and sometimes what was resistance will become support and vice versa. The user can elect to see these highs and lows from any or all of the most recent 5 days including the current day. In the chart above the current day’s open is plotted as a blue +, the current day’s high is plotted as a red dot and the low as a blue dot. Previous days’ highs and lows are plotted as the same color, but smaller, dots.
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Jeez - Get a Life and don't forget to keep up with the meds. An amazing amount of verbiage from one with virtually no experience or understanding of the game or the business of running the game. Probably the same about what you write about the markets.
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None of the poker rooms in Las Vegas cheat or scam as a matter of policy. At the same time, every now and then, an employee or a player or a combination of the two will initiate a scam to cheat either the house or other players. They are always discovered and most of the time they are publicly arrested and hauled out in handcuffs to discourage others. Having knowledge of the operations of some of the biggest online sites I know for sure that the same is true for all credible online sites. These sites collect hundreds of millions dollars in rake and some are even publicly traded companies on exchanges as respected as the London Stock Exchange (LSE). Any sign of cheating at any publicly traded site would instantly kill its stock price and its revenues. So while there have been a couple of instances of cheating in a couple of the hundreds of online sites, like Vegas, it was never a matter of policy. I personally know dozens of players making 6 figures and more from online play. I even know one hedge fund analyst who quit his 6 figure job to play online. There was a recent article by an accountant (good w/numbers) who had been making low six figures for the last 6 years (twice what he made as an accountant) playing online poker and now he is out of work. I resent the govt telling me what I can and cannot do with my money and my time and I am sorry for all of the people and businesses that are part of the US economy that have been hurt by this recent action. Some people are so weak of character and understanding that they want and need a "nanny state" to direct and regulate all business, social and even recreational interactions. I do not. Poker is a game of skill and the vast majority of all games whether online or brick and mortar are honestly run and I resent anyone telling me I can't play. I find it interesting and must question the motives of the two posters above who post so big but obviously know so little about the subject at hand. UrmaBlume
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I think MightyMouse's cape has SuperNit on the back of it - I know most of his posts do. MILLIONS of US players have been playing online for more than a decade with no prosecutions and now that this most recent drastic action has taken place, most of the people I know that are really in the know, believe a backlash will make the pendulum more likely to swing towards legalization than prosecution. That's not to mention the recent World Trade Organization decisions against the US for just this kind of legislation and action. UrmaBlume
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The availability of online poker plus the availability of dozens of good books on the subject make it easier than ever for anybody to learn poker. Books I would recommend: Super System 2 - Doyle Brunson Theory Of Poker - Sklansky Practical Poker Math - me Small Stakes Holdem - Sklansky/Miller/Malmuth Hold'em Poker for Advanced Players - Sklansky/Malmuth No-Limit Hold'em - Sklansky/Miller Tournament Poker - Sklansky All of Dan Harrington's Books Pot Limit Omaha - Jeff Hawang Sit N Go Strategy - Collin Moshman If you live outside the US you have all the online sites in the world available to you and I recommend you start with online play. US players still have several sites available to them. Most of these sites offer both free play and very low/micro stakes play. I recommend that you DO NOT play the free sites as the play there bears no resemblance to real world play. I suggest you start at what to you are very low and affordable stakes. I like poker and I like the markets and if I can be of any help I am usually up on Skype as UrmaBlume. Good Luck cheers UB
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I live in Vegas so there are plenty of brick and mortar alternatives. I am running a bit behind on a couple of deadlines for my next book so I am taking a bit of a break from poker. There are still sites that take US players but they don't have the action and it will be some time until they do. However, when the withdrawal symptoms get too strong I will probably play some of the small dollar events at The Orleans. They are very friendly, small tournaments that are well run and they offer 2 events a day - one at noon and one at 7pm. Below is a shot of my desk where I work and trade during the day and play multiple poker events after the market. Below that is my office window with some of the 1st place plaques I won at the Orleans events mentioned above before online poker got too good to ignore. Some of the hardcore online players use a setup like this to play in as many as 24 tables/events at the same time. As in HFT trading there is something called rake back in poker where high volume players could, before recent govt action, play just break-even poker and still get low six figures a year from action rebates.
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By all means, yes - I do. How can learning to make decisions on line and the ability to judge risk and reward not help you develop as a trader. Plus poker is a great and, for some, a profitable hobby with million dollar competitions around the world that are open to all. Notice the bottom paragraph in the back cover. It's a note about a trading operation that only hires poker players (click image to expand).
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All of this is quite easily done in TradeStation's Radar Screen. You can write up any indicator you want and then using the new PSP objects in TS 9.0 initiate a timer object that will fire at any interval you choose. We currently scan over 400 stocks, 36 commodities and a couple of dozen forex pairs in Radar Screen with no difficulty. These scans run every 60 seconds but the period is completely adjustable to any interval you like. We select what we trade based on current local relative price volatilities and relative trade volumes. Information = Equity cheers UrmaBlume
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Simply load as much data into a chart as you want. Run the indicator. From the View menu select data window and then hit the disk icon to save all the data into a comma delimited file that you can easily import into any spreadsheet or database. The file will contain time/date, HLOC & volume info for each bar as well as the values of the indicator. While you have the data window open you can click on any bar and its values and well as the indicators's value will appear in the data window.. Cheers UrmaBlume
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We don't care so much about which symbol as we care about trading where the action is. We use TradeStation's Radar Screen and our own custom scans to find out of sequence relative trade volumes and unusually high relative local price volatilities in all instruments. Whether there is news or not – at any point in time, among the thousands of financial instruments traded around the world there is a small subset that exhibits these unusually high relative trade volumes and/or local price volatilities. Through a process we call the serial normalization of market performance data we produce relative values of local trade volumes and local price volatilities so that the performance of symbols can be compared one to the other. A symbol trading at 40% of what is normal volume for that issue may be trading a much higher absolute volume than an issue that is trading at 200% of normal volume and yet not offer the opportunity of the symbol trading at the lower absolute volume but higher relative volume. Below are the results of scanning and sorting 400 stocks for both relative volume and price volatility as well as a sort for the most popular futures and forex pairs. These scans were taken at the close 3 days ago. Information = Equity Trade What's Hot and Not Trade What's Not. cheers UrmaBlume
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Stock Traders: How Do You Find Your Symbols?
UrmaBlume replied to Firm Biz's topic in General Trading
News is created and then, like trade, it follows the sun around the world. Sometimes such news can cause the trade in certain instruments to exhibit out-of-sequence trade volumes and abnormal local price volatilities. Knowledge of such situations can equal opportunity for the astute investor. At some other times and in the absence of any discernible, relevant news, certain other markets will exhibit these same unusually high trade volumes and local price volatilities. This is another kind of opportunity – one where something is going on, but not as many people know about it. Whether there is news or not – at any point in time, among the thousands of financial instruments traded around the world there is a small subset that exhibits these unusually high relative trade volumes and/or local price volatilities. Through a process we call the serial normalization of market performance data we produce relative values of local trade volumes and local price volatilities so that the performance of symbols can be compared one to the other. A symbol trading at 40% of what is normal volume for that issue may be trading a much higher absolute volume than an issue that is trading at 200% of normal volume and yet not offer the opportunity of the symbol trading at the lower absolute volume but higher relative volume. Below are the results of scanning and sorting 400 stocks for both relative volume and price volatility as well as a sort for the most popular futures and forex pairs. These scans were taken at the close 3 days ago. We are building a scan for all of the liquid equities with direct market acces, world-wide. Information = Equity Trade What's Hot and Not Trade What's Not.