redlew

Since I trade only on a daily basis and am flat after market hours I tend to think of manipulation in the very short time frame. I am convinced that the black box traders have ways to jam the market at points of support and resistance that happen so fast that the rest of us mouse clickers are vulnerable to it. If your software will make charts in one second or one tick intervals, compare the bars to the time and sales when the YM has been swept and see if you don't notice some patterns. Those guys know where stops are likely to be and can probe the market and offset their trades in milliseconds. If they can cascade some stops it is free money, if it doesn't work, what the heck they are in and out without much risk. Is it manipulation? I guess it depends how you look at it.

Great topic Soultrader. Intuition is a great tool. Developing it is not so easy. When I am in a losing trade and intuition tells me that I should bail before my stop is taken out, intuition battles with hope. When I am in a winning trade that is developing slower than I want (I want that profit now! )and know that I should be patient and not take profits too soon, intuition battles fear and greed. It is a tough balance to find. It is also easy to think that I am having intuition when I am not finding any set ups to trade and just on the sidelines watching. Experience is the filter for intuition. The link that follows is for a gal that specializes in the psychological aspects of intuition and trading. Go to the Press and Papers section and check out her stuff. I think it is good stuff. http://www.marketfocusing.com/main.html]MarketFocusing

Newtrader, Some good advice from the others here. I would add that my trading improved a lot when I came to the realization that I was looking at indicators because I wanted to be told what to do. When this line does this, then I should do that. The problem there is that all those lines are generated from the past price action and really just tell you what you should have done, not what you should do now. A trader is just one auctioneer amongst many other auctioneers, and all are in a two way auction. So your job is to try to find what value is in the market you are trading. In other words does the price want to go up or down? And then try to position yourself accordingly. I got away from all the high powered computing and started to study the people who first figured out what really constitutes a market. Take a look at the old guys. Richard Wyckoff is my favorite.

Great link DeefMan, I read it and decided to have a look at the bond market to see if it would hold up there. The chart is a daily volume histogram based on 15 minute bars. Neoticker (software that produced the chart) uses a yellow bar at the mean of the standard deviation as their POC. My highlights use the max volume bar instead which we all know would be the actual volume based POC. There does seem to be a good correlation for the virgins and S/R points. Since the 1rst of October the correlation hasn't been there though. The market has been surging back and forth in a 3 point range since the middle of September so maybe this indicator breaks down somewhat in range bound and more volatile periods. Not bad though for the first look at this!