omni2006

CBOT Market Profile Handbook hth

actually, the atrader guy (Jimbo) started an announcement type thread on ET on April 10th of this year. since it's on a different forum, i won't post the link here, but you can search for "live tpo profile" and should get the thread if you are interested. hope this helps. Take care - Derek

i don't pay much attention to overnight profiles or pocs. even though the globex session is 2.5 times the RTH session, volume is usually about 20-25% of RTH. i do want to know the overnight range and any significant reference points (i.e. reaction to news events or reports, etc). otherwise, i rely on the daily RTH profile. hth

absolutely, nothing wrong at all with this suggestion. i just suggested a card since the OP stated he was looking for a card. as for the condition of the Matrox cards, i have three in perfect working order and have bought and sold several others; never a glitch or hiccup with any of them. i suspect it is like anything else hardware related - YMMV btw, good thoughts on the dual PCIe mobo. if anyone is upgrading, this is definitely something to keep in mind when looking at your options. have a great week!

agreed. i've been happily using the old Matrox g200 for a few years with no problems. it's PCI and has 8mb per video port. plenty for charts. $50 and done. hth

Hi Hie and welcome to the forum. obviously, TL is a good place to start. This thread lists a lot of different resources. some are websites, some are books, some are PDFs. for courses, i am very partial to the CL/CES. Jim Dalton's offers this course through his company, DLC Profiles, over at MarketsInProfile. Material and interaction coming straight from the man behind Mind Over Markets and Markets In Profile. I'm about three months into the course and find Jim's discussions and insights indispensable. as for trading rooms, the only MP related room i have been in and can recommend is JP's room. he's a former floor trader, works real hard to keep a positive and productive room, and has over 20yrs trading experience. there are several MP chart providers and esignal is one of them. i'm not a fan, but won't hate on a product/vendor either. i will say that i have been using WindoTrader for almost two months and have stopped looking for chart vendors. currently, the only data source available for WT is esignal, so i couldn't completely escape good ol' e$ignal (though WT is testing additional feeds). hope this helps. and, again, welcome to TL. take care - omni

i've never visited it, but Reza runs the room you mentioned: profiletraders.com. He also posts his trades in a daily blog. somewhere on the site it mentions using a 2.25 max stop, but just a quick look at today's blog shows adding a third unit to a position that already had 4pts heat. maybe he has changed his thresholds and just hasn't updated the site. many have mentioned JP and i have been a member of JP's room off and on for a while. I too recommend checking it out. next time he has a free trial, sign up and give it a whirl. I like JP a lot and think he's a stand up guy trying to do the right thing. hope this helps

his original 2008 goal was $1mm. when he reached that, he raised it to $1.25mm. he finished the year up roughly $1.6mm. he changed his goals a couple times for 2009, trying to get a good read on the market and his trading trends. initially he was going to cut back and just wanted to be green ... even up by $1 by the end of 2009 was to be considered successful. he then got his trading groove going and set a $1.2mm goal for 2009. since, he's adjusted it to a flat $1mm. Don trades decent size (i think it is in chunks of 15, 30, and 60), but frequency is the standout here. Don is a seat-holding liquidity provider, so, yes, he does trade a crap-ton of contracts. it's not unusual for him to trade 2-4k contracts (so in a single session, 1-2k round turns). Don spends a lot of time in the market, putting out feeler or probing trades. he has repeatedly pointed out that he is the type of trader who gets a better feel for the current by being in the water. if he makes money on his feeler bets, great, but he is testing the water for a bigger current he can ride. also, keep in mind that Don doesn't get too wrapped up in daily averages and statistics. his intraday win-loss ratio and P/L per trade doesn't look too appealing. but he probably averages about $7-9k net per day. i'm sure that looks appealing to most people. hope that helps.

maybe i'm the last to see this, but i thought it was fun. and a good way to head into the weekend. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU1pD4xPe2M]Enjoy![/ame] Have a great weekend, traders ...

Hi Johnny - James is correct, WindoTrader can produce composite profiles. i have attached a couple screenshots showing some different ways to do it. basically, you can have a composite on the left side (the different shading is for the different days), merge daily profiles within the main chart, or a combination. there may be other ways, but i don't typically use composites so i'm not as familiar with those settings. i don't have either market, so i used the ES. hope this helps.

is it just me, or did the attachment not make it to the post?

correct, acceptance of price. a lot of volume will be concentrated within a small range of prices. correct, no price or prices really stand out as accepted. here it is the direction, not concentrated prices, that is accepted. the high volume is within the context of recent sessions, not any particular price level within a single session. when there is strong/healthy volume and a trendy day, you should see volume pretty fairly distributed across the prices. it is unlikely that a significant POC will emerge. no worries, i think just about everyone here has a desire to advance their own market understanding and help others do the same. traders helping traders hth thanks and take care - omni

correct, John, i'm currently enrolled in DLC Profiles' CL/CES course. i'll put my $0.02 towards your questions and, as you noted, leave it open for others to chime in on as well. btw, good questions John. the shortest answer will be this: yes, subjectivity is a constant in discretionary trading, be it through a Market Profile lens or any other perspective. that being said, Dalton still uses those data points in his analysis and teachings. however, he makes a concerted effort to frame concrete levels in a more abstract view. it's too easy for a trader to find a level, any level, and fall in love with it, completely disregarding any discernible context. if i have a range estimate and multiple TPOs, yet the market blows right through my levels, Jim doesn't want me overweighing old information. the market has provided me new information and deemed my previous information as currently irrelevant. and, of course, even that could change with new information. it often comes down to monitoring expectations. if something unexpected happens, that is powerful information that i need to incoporate into my market view. interestingly, Jim discussed something along these lines a week or so ago. and, without divulging proprietary course material, the answer here is context. a TPO based Value Area is more visually derived (i.e. TPOs above/below POC) than a Volume based Value Area, so it is easiest to use TPOs for visual reference. but, again, if volume paints a different picture, that information needs to be processed and evaluated. the expected is that volume and TPOs closely resemble each other. regardless of any method to calculate anything, Jim is never advocates buying/selling any level or price without putting things into context. understandably, traders want to be able to distill everything down to mathematical recipes, but that's not what Jim or DLC or Market Profile is about. i've come to accept that there is more art than science to this game. and, since there are a lot of very technical discussions within our forum, i am compelled to reiterate that this is: 1. my perspective 2. related to discretionary trading. i'm not trying to step on any toes or discredit any method, strategy, or system. i sincerely hope this helps. take care and have a great week - omni

through some digging, i found that the presentation i was referring to was done in 2001 and hosted by Zap Futures. Well, RJO bought Zap and the link went away with the acquisition. however, i was able to find my old archive of the audio file and the presentation slides. i put the slides into a Word file and uploaded them here. and here is the MP3 file. not surprisingly, what Jim was talking about in 2001 echoed his thoughts from Mind Over Markets (completed in 1990). his current teachings retain the core concepts from these previous offerings as well. btw, i left out a couple of slides that were no longer applicable (i.e. old, defunct email addresses and so forth). otherwise, it's all the original material from the free online presentation. Enjoy!

Hi John and welcome to the forum regarding studies on Vol vs. TPO POCs, i did see a study a few years back that suggested the calculation was generally of marginal consequence. Usually, volume, ticks (trades), and TPOs line up pretty closely. here is my answer: it depends. i am sure it will not be a popular response, but there it is. context is more important to me than mathematical specifics. btw, i don't think you could have picked a better day to post your question. today our Volume POC was 12pts lower than our TPO based POC. so which is it? when we take a contextual look at the profile here's what stands out to me: an elongated profile and no prominent POC, regardless of calculation method. something else that stands out to me is what didn't happen. ideally, volume will correspond to time, so that both POC's would be within the same general proximity. that didn't happen today. the unexpected happened. we spent more time than volume at our TPO POC. that means even though we were in that area for a while today not a lot of business was actually taking place. and, late in the day, we did a lot of business much lower. i know that doesn't give you a very tidy response, but i really think taking into account market context trumps any level or area. for days like today, it just may be that neither POC is very important. but it is useful to be aware of both areas and the circumstances surrounding each. i hope this helps.