bgtrader

I totally hear you Blowfish. I like scanning the horizon's for ideas on how traders/programmers visualize data differently but prefer self-reliance. The charts that Fulcrumtrader has crafted for himself with .75 range renko bars with wicks and cumulative delta underneath, in Investor RT, really opened my eyes to simple clean charts. What's neat about the renko bars is their ability to make pivoting action really pop out at you, the major drawback being that traditional renkos don't show you the excursion of price above/below your set range. But, now several charting packages offer renko + candle wicks, so you get the whole picture. OFA's thing with rotation bars is interesting; I feel with a little auction/market profile adaptive structures where you can set the volume profile start points, plus renko+wick range bars and cum delta it's kind of like a poor man's OFA. The pivots jump out at you, the rotation volume profile structures are there for you to see, and you can do the bid/ask institutional inventory analysis on your own. Linnsoft's InvestorRT and Market Delta do that pretty easily, as does Sierra Charts I believe. Here's Fulcrumtrader's link on charthub, showing tons of such charts. Charts by user | ChartHub.com Normal range bars work too, but there's something really nice about renko's ability to focus our eyes on pivoting action in price. You throw in some home cooked trade intensity and that's a seriously clean signal chart . By the way, here's a quote from Iqfeed.net's site concerning their data feed: "30 calendar days of tick (includes pre-post market) and several years of 1-Minute history (Forex back to Feb 2005, Eminis back to Sept. 2005, Stock/Futures/Indexes back to May 2007) retrieval for charting and time & sales data " I'm fairly certain the bid/ask history is 30 days, and I'm curious by their mention of time & sales data along with several years of 1min history...could that mean that with the grainularity of 1min sampling, we can get time & sales history of several years. I'm calling them tomorrow to ask.

I completely agree; I think $150/month for software and room would attract a serious crowd of students/traders. Maybe another option to work in their education could be to pay $1500 for 12 month commitment to the software and trading, and for that $1500 upfront, they throw in the course/bootcamp. Easily find a few hundred traders imho. I hope OFA reads this post and offers something like this. The more streamlined price structure of just 2 options makes it all easier on the eyes and more attractive for a long term committment :dito

Hi All, I left a message to OFA on their website requesting a phone chat and demo of their software, and they called my home phone within 10 minutes. I spoke with one of their marketing guys who is also a trader. Here are some of the highlights my demo/walkthrough: --their software bypasses NinjaTrader for volume/delta bid*ask analysis, with a direct API to Rithmic/Zenfire for trade data, and uses the NinjaTrader DOM for order entry. So, their special bar charts with the columns that form on new rotations in price/order flow are not using Ninja charts, rather it's their own charting going direct to Rithmic/Zenfire. Perhaps, this increases data accuracy or reduces latency by a small amount. And, for Ninja 6.5, this will lessen the processor load that Ninja's charts tend to have, as their software isn't engaging Ninja's charting at all. Supposedly, this processor heavy feature of Ninjatrader's charts is completely resolved in version 7.0. --their bar logic is interesting and forms based on price probes into areas and then when certain changes in order flow happen during a probe, a new bar may form. I went through examples of charts on their website and in youtube videos, where I counted the bid volume and the ask volume of each bar and compared that to the total delta that's listed after each bar forms....interestingly, I was off each time, and this leads me to believe that they have a proprietary way of adding to the bar delta perhaps after certain criteria are met near the high volume node or other criteria. It's not as simple as total delta of the bar imho. They mention phrases like algorithmic trade patterns on their site and have a trading course that is loaded with an auction market pattern section, so I'm assuming that their is an advanced market profile pattern logic in the bar formation and the trade signals. --their software includes a semi-auto order entry feature which can enter a conditional limit order or several that will only trigger when their bar signal rotation logic criteria are met. The parameters for this semi-auto system can be adjusted in various ways. In the demo, the OFA rep, entered a conditional limit order, and it was interesting to watch price trade through the limit order and not trigger as the rotation/probe pattern criteria weren't met. --their trading software and education approach are the work of a fellow named DB Vaello, who the rep explained was an exceptional trader and gives a great deal to the OFA students/customers in terms of education and customer service. (DB will be giving a webinar through Mirus Futures this Tuesday 3:30pm CST, registration link: Trading Education. Order Flow Analysis in the eMini S&P 500. D.B. Vaello, Order Flow Analytics.) --they offer a few indicators that compliment their probe/rotation bars, these indicators and the NinjaTrader DOM interface for semi-auto trade execution, I believe are all extra cost to the basic software My feelings...as Fulcrumtrader wrote, anytime people are delving deeper into order flow analysis and zeroing in on volume patterns, this gives an edge. In the software demo shown to me via an Omnovia screen sharing room, their stuff seemed very solid and coded very well. For NinjaTrader plug-ins, I'd say they spent a lot of money and time getting the code to be very smooth. I, personally, don't like looking at the bid*ask bars with numbers of contracts filling the bars in the Market Delta charting package or the OFA software; this is a personal preference, and I know many traders that swear by Market Delta. I think many Market Delta users will be very intrigued by the robust trade pattern logic built into OFA's package, and I think many will be attracted to OFA's emphasis on actionable criteria first and not a toolbox of charting possibilities. That said, I prefer to look at range bars (like .75 renko with wicks in InvestorRT) and volume bars...visually the data makes more sense to me that way. When I see the bid*ask numbers on the bars, I get a little overwhelmed. I can see how someone that uses other charting styles as their main charts could use OFA's proprietary bars as an additional signal and complimentary view of data. Kam Dhadwar over at L2st.co.uk has a chart setup like this with Market Delta where he looks over at the bid*ask bars as a sort of signal chart and has several volume bar charts open to look for entries and manage trades. The sales structure of their software and education doesn't appeal to me, but may be great for others. For $99 you get the basic proprietary charting or $1200 for lifetime lease, but for all the cool trade signal and conditional order entry indicators you have to purchase each of those separately, for an additional $1600 total if you purchased all 4. Then, there's the educational packages, which are probably pretty good, especially for trading the liquid futures markets. If a market student decided they wanted to go "all in" software and education with OFA, we're looking at $6000+. What is a nice feature of their "apprentice" package for $3600 is that includes $25/month for life access to their online trading room led by DB. I think that the OFA system will appeal to traders that don't currently have a profitable system and feel the need for foundation education to day trade the ES and liquid futures markets. From my experience, OFA as a company seem to be genuine traders crafting some neat tools and actually trading them everyday. In the age of information/resource sharing that we live in where companies are giving more free services to the public, I feel like OFA's pricing structure would attract more potential customers if they went with a simpler $99/month for software and partial trading room access, $1200 total software+tools lifetime lease, and $1200 for total education package plus $25/month total trading room access. This would put the price point around $2400, which I think would attract more traders that don't yet have a profitable system. This is my personal bias as someone with an entrepreneurial spirit, and I am by no means saying that OFA does not deserve the prices they have set, as they've clearly spent a great deal of time and energy in research and development. Order Flow Analytics is a new company and I'm curious to see how their tools & offerings evolve. I wish them the best.

Hi Electroniclocal and friends, Very cool blog , thanks for the link. It's funny blowfish and everyone, I was just thinking of posting about the aggression of buyers/sellers to move the market way of seeing things and I wanted to hear blowfish's opinion. Also, to keep it relevant to this thread, I spoke on the phone with Order Flow Analytics for around 2.5 hours and will provide a review when I'm feeling more awake later today . I was taught, while for every buyer there's a seller, in order for price to actually move in a trend direction for an extended period of time, one group-the buyers or the sellers-needs to behave more aggressively and eat through the offers (aggressive buyers) or eat through the bids (aggressive sellers)....and that eating through the available contracts of one price level and then consistently going through the next level and the next, thereby lifting the offers or lowering the bids causes the price to actually move up or down. There's some very good free videos on this idea from Kam Dhadwar over at this link: L2ST - Trading Futures Online - Contact Us Scroll down to the three videos under the phrase "L2ST FREE Webinar Recordings" on the bottom left side on the screen. What's interesting about what Futurescalper's (Futures Scalping Home Page, and youtube channel under 'Futurescalper'), is that he shows pretty clearly that there's an additional dimension to the price movement often preceding the shift of aggressive buyers/sellers, that being the groups that are sitting on the DOM levels-market maker types that have the resources to get in front of the globex orders and stay there....when they want to move the market up they often begin by moving large amounts of their offer DOM inventory to higher and higher tiers, thereby inviting the aggressive buyers and auto-trading programs to buy...vice versa for the sell side and their bid DOM inventory. This detail happens so fast that it is often missed. And the DOM orders seem to be disappearing and reappearing so randomly that it doesn't seem to make any directional sense, and there's really spoofing going on as well. But, if you applied signal processing and variance statistics to the DOM activity some patterns seem to emerge, even the spoofing being accounted for. And, yes, I understand that many very knowledgeable and successful traders say the DOM is rubbish as an indicator. I'm not saying I'm certain that it's useful. I'm open to the research of Futurescalper and encourage other traders to check out his ideas. So, those are 2 dimensions, the behavior of people actually hitting the offers or bids more/less aggressively and the behavior of market makers moving their DOM orders. I think very often the sequence starts for example, with market makers replenishing their bid[/i ]DOM orders against a group of sellers and then when enough pressure builds up, the market makers will begin moving their [i]offers up on the DOM triggering buyers to behave more aggressively and leaving the sellers in a losing position (obviously, reverse happens often also where market makers replenish offers on the DOM against buyers, only to later spike price down by lowering their bids. Part of the idea here is that only certain groups could afford the risk involved with stuffing lots of orders on the DOM tiers and often take the opposite side to everyone else's trades all day/night long. The auction market theory guys like to describe things in terms of responsive and initiated buying/selling. Where, often price will run into a block of resting limit orders and pause for a while = responsive. And then, groups will aggressive hit one side of the DOM consistently and move price up or down for a trend = initiated. So, perhaps the responsive resting limit orders gives us a 3rd dimension of price movement to the other dimensions of aggressive entering of orders on one side of the DOM more than the other, and moving large blocks of DOM inventory higher or lower. I'm sure someone with more experience can describe other dimensions of why price moves on say the globex futures system like arbitrage activity and other factors. In my first post in this thread, where I commented on Paolfili's chart with divergences, I tried to communicate that cumulative delta of volume can show us moments where, for example, the bid was being hit very aggressively--showing red cumulative delta candlesticks plot lower and lower, and price was not able to make a new low. I tried to communicate that this is sometimes called 'hidden divergence' as perhaps it's showing that while sellers behaved more aggressively on the DOM, bids were replenished against this aggression, thereby holding price against these groups. Often, price will move in the opposite direction soon after this, as was the case in the grey trendline divergences on Paolfili's chart. As, this thread is about Order Flow Analytics software, and their software is partly based on the assumption that orders going off at the bid are market order sells (red on time & sales) and orders going off at the ask are market order buys (green on time & sales), I felt the above ideas are relevant. The phrase market order, on Order Flow Analytics website videos, I think both means actual market orders that were entered as market orders AND groups that enter on limit orders that want in on the market right away, so they are willing to buy at the higher offer prices and sell to the lower bid prices, rather than sticking their buys in the bid DOM tiers or sells in the offer DOM tiers and waiting for a better price....again, I understand that as price is moving up, orders on the bid side of DOM are triggering as buys also and reverse, but I think what Order Flow Analytics and other auction market/cumulative delta traders are getting at is that in order for the price actually move one way or the other, many traders are hitting the offers as buys and hitting the bids as sells, foregoing the chance to get tick price improvement in order to join the party...and the cascading sequence of this activity seems to cause the price to trend. Later today I'd like to comment on what I learned about Order Flow Analytic's take on this for developing their trading signals and Blowfish's comment about whether the data tracking in Order Flow Analytics and other means of bid/ask volume is accurate enough for good trade decisions. Blowfish and others, I'd love to hear your perspectives on these ideas. -best wishes always, BG p.s. Blowfish, sorry I missed your comment on 'strange effects' of market going up and delta going down. Can you post a chart like this so we can analyze it together?

Hi Blowfish, Thanks for your reply and for the research leads I look forward to more research sharing in this arena. I do believe that the DTN data source Iqfeed.net provides bid/ask data on every tick of trade for 30 days of history. :)

Hi Blowfish, I would like to second Paolfili and say that I really appreciate your insightful posts and gentleman's attitude toward dialogue. Reading your posts was one of the reasons why I joined traderslab also. I am definitely naive and I can see the difference years of experience has in the clarity & succinct use of language your posts have over mine. Thank you and all the other good experienced folks here for sharing . I apologize if I came off as very "certain" of my assumptions in my posts in this thread. I have been synthesizing some models of understanding different market participants' unique ways of entering/exiting the markets, and in excitement I joined the discussion when I saw the mention of divergence between price and cumulative volume, as I was just thinking about that. I tried to communicate in my post that although bid/ask differentiation is not perfectly showing us pure buyers and pure sellers, after studying a bit with Fulcrumtrader, it seems like when the bid/ask tracking scale tips to a big enough order of magnitude (i.e. 4000-10000+ contracts in ES) that this can give us something useful. Perhaps, in a fractal sense, even smaller ratios could give us some actionable information also for shorter moves. Fulcrumtraders research in working for and interviewing institutional trading firms revealed that often the firms will enter a good deal of their positions in the market very quickly via market orders, thus "perhaps" showing up to a greater degree on one side of the DOM. Also, I wanted to hear your feedback about an addendum to your clarification of "for every buyer there is a seller". In a talk a few years ago, Sebastian Manby brought up the idea that technically, large numbers of single human buyers may run into an iceberg order of one or two entities, and he stated thereby that there's not necessarily a seller for every buyer. I thought about this as I read your post and wondered, obviously the permutations you listed of contract per contract buying/selling hold. However, do market participants, as in a well capitalized firm, behave differently when they can take on exponential multiples of risk compared to the 1000s of traders they may be buying from or selling to? So, I'm proposing that on a contract per contract basis you're right, but because there are entities that can think as a single unit yet take the other side of a trade of 1000s of free thinking units (retail)-that this makes their relationship to the 1:1 buyer/seller equation more complex and perhaps requires a more robust model. In studying the works of Fulcrumtrader; a bond futures market maker family member of mine who works on Wallstreet; Futurescalper (http://www.futurescalper.com); the Institute of Auction Market Theory; balancetrader (frank at balancetrader.com), Urma Blume's posts, and others, I've been opened to the idea that like groups of predator animals living near each other-lions, cheetahs, leopards, hyeenas, and wild dogs, the market has different elite participants that due to their superior and sometimes varying resources have certain completely different ways of relating to buying and selling. Futurescalper's youtube channel has alot of interesting ideas about market maker participants that almost only execute their orders through resting orders on the DOM, UrmaBlume's firm tracks institutions that rapidly pulse in orders, Fulcrumtrader's research into institutional trading within very liquid instruments assumes that large institutions are often pulsing in market orders, then there are also areas of resting limit orders that can create pauses or tops and there are blends of these tactics and more tactics that all these groups and other groups I haven't mentioned employ. So, I've been exploring models that try to account for the dominant features of these powerful groups and their behavioral tendencies. The bid/ask mechanism (please critique this idea I'm about the share) seemed to say to me that in order for price to tick up a participant has to hit the offer or an a series of stops is struck that cascades offers being hit & vice versa for the downside. Futurescalper adds the idea that there are participants that he is calling "market makers" who rely on crowding the DOM books to move price by moving their DOM orders up or down and inviting the market to follow, and essentially always making the spread. These are only two dimensions I've been considering in the bid/ask mechanism recently. So, the very physics of the trade ladder for how orders get entered seems to show that bid/ask classification can have useful meaning. I know I'm missing details here and I'd love to hear your's and other's feedback. -best regards, B

I agree with you. I think there is a misunderstanding. I realize there are much more complex dynamics to the market's movements than what I stated. I was simply addressing the basic idea that the divergence that you pointed out in your chart was tradeable. I noticed the trades taken on your chart, 2 trades which seemed to both lose. I was just pointing out out the grey line's divergence as a possible very short term intra day trade setups that might've worked. I am not stuck in Tom William's approach or Order Flow's approach. I was curious about your statement that divergences seem not respected and I examined how possibly they were respected. I don't think my view is the correct one, it's just the opinion that I formed today.

Hello Paolfili, Okay, let's learn together. 1) on your chart alone, it seems that short positions over all are being accumulated and as you say "defended". Within this defense, I believe there is at least one example of some shorts being turned into weak holders and capitulating to other parties. The down leg of price by the grey trendline starts it's down move at around 1092.50. If we generalize and say that weak holders will have stops 2 points above that at 1094.50, then I believe we see some capitulation/exchange volume activity between rough times 16.51 & 16.54. In the larger picture, I agree with you it seems "microdivergence". However, the point of my post was to address what you said about divergence. I wanted to demonstrate that the grey line's divergences were respected in a "hidden divergence" sense, where sellers stepped in and price was not permitted to go to a new low yet. I wanted to demonstrate that this divergence, on an intraday basis, was tradeable. I believe this is an example of volume leading price. Imagine martial artists fighting for a moment. In one fight, you've got opponent "A" who has an injured right arm, it's observed by opponent "B", opponent "B" exploits this weakness and wins. This would be normal divergence of volume leading price in the way we tend to "expect". In another fight you've got opponent "C" who purposefully leaves his right arm down to lead his opponent into a position that fighter "C" has anticipated and has a hidden agenda about. This would be hidden divergence, wherein the losing fighter took the bait, expecting to find weakness but his expectations weren't met. Again, I agree with you on the daily perspective. I was addressing intraday trading ideas and delta volume divergence that is respected. 2,3, and your last post, let's chat via skype or gmail chat for better communication flow if you're into it:)

Hi everyone, I understand that traders on this forum are critical of claims, methodologies, etc...This is one of the main reasons why I came to traderslaboratory. However, I think in the fever of wanting to shoot down any potential snake oil sales guy, posters will fire a critique with a chart very quickly without much attempt on one's own to see the chart from multiple perspectives first before forming an opinion. I am definitely guilty of this in my internet conversations with traders, wherein I will often lazily state such and such about a chart and put it to the more experienced guy to prove me wrong. I'm not calling Paolfili lazy, that's just how I feel about myself sometimes . I'm just noticing my own tendency to want someone else to either be wrong or show me something. Obvisouly, there's nothing wrong with posting questions and firm critiques, I'm just rambling about the dynamics of gentlemanly conversation on Traderslab. For example, Paolfili, posted a chart with the words "divergencenotrespected" in the title. Let's look at those divergences: 1. Grey line: Grey line on bid/ask delta shows increased selling on greater down slope than grey line on price. Grey line on price ends on an attempt to go down, but doesn't reach 1088.50 region, stalls at 1090 region. So, perhaps, we can say, that sellers hit the bid fairly aggressively (some profit taking for longs and shorts taking positions), the sellers tried to get price to go back to at least 1088.50, but a combination of market makers & institutions held price and allowed sellers to take on risk, building up pressure, then the market reverses upwards taking out sellers stops and causing more profitable upward momentum. This happens all the time, I believe most traders refer to this as "hidden divergence". I feel that cumulative delta volume shows this really well, as it's not a momentum price formula, rather it shows us actual trade volume that wanted to go short so badly that they aggressively hit the bid....BUT, those aggressive sellers weren't able to move price to a significantly lower low. Upon seeing this accumulation of short positions where price couldn't go to expected range, predatory entities (market maker, institution, any firm big enough to move price around) may step in to run the market up and cash out of long positions as the sellers stops get hit. From a hidden divergence perspective, this could've been a good long setup. 2. Blue line: may be showing the same condition. I would've put the blue line on the market price and delta volume "tops", showing that the market went higher but aggressive buyer volume wasn't as strong, possibly setting up a "normal" divergence setup as a short at 1097. And price did go down around 8 points, pretty good divergence play . Blue lines also form potential hidden divergence long play before market was taken down. 3. green line: while we don't see much farther than the green line and I don't have my charting opened to see what happened next. Maybe, stressing the maybe, the down sloping delta volume is just showing us that "overall" the roughly 4 hour period, more long positions were sold than entered and short positions were accumulated. However, if you read through fulcrumtrader's blog, free videos, and youtube channel, I believe you'll glean that his analysis of divergences goes much deeper than simply eying slope differences between price and an indicator. When the market is moving, traders that mean to enter with size and have the means to "pulse" in the orders (ala UrmaBlume's posts), how are they going to do that so fast? Probably by entering mostly aggressive orders, often market orders. So, the bid/ask delta can show us the preponderance of market order entries. Now, it's not perfect, as UrmaBlume stated in a post, the very distinction of trades at bid and ask can get messy, as for example, there's 2000 available at the first 2 tiers on the offer side of the DOM, and someone comes in to aggressively buy 3000, perhaps 2000 will show up as a green trade on time and sales and 1000 will show up as red. But, the overall magnitude of delta of bid/ask can show us a clue as the sentiment of players that are powerful enough to move the market. I think like a tracker in the wilderness examines odd features & details of the environment which provide information, most of the data of volume, time, and price can give us something, some clue as to what may be occurring. The key of the successful hunters and traders is the robust filtering and interpretation of this information. I am a student of Fulcrumtrader's methods, as well as studying tons of other material like everyone else, and I really like the simplicity that Fulcrumtrader brings to volume analysis. -hugs, Brian

Hi guys, Just a quick VSA stab at the chart. Bar#11: -ultra wide spread down bar with high relative volume --those conditions are putting a VSA chartist on contrarian alert, thinking that there's the strong possibility that market makers are spiking price down and herd follows-possibly on negative news/numbers/events...all in order to accumulate long positions at lower prices Bar#14: -higher relative volume, relatively narrow range closing in the middle, could be result of preset resting limit buy orders stopping the market a bit in a narrow range ---now looking for an attempt to go lower but volume drying up, possibly indicating most of the supply has been removed absorbed Bar#16: -volume significantly lower than previous volume periods (especially previous two bars), attempt to go down on narrow range, could be end of lower prices,possibly indicating professionals are withdrawing their interest in selling the market any lower ***very aggressive trader might enter long on breach of Bar#16's high ****more conservative entry might be close of bar#17-possibly showing us that a few professionals realized around the same time that prices were at a buyer's bargain, creating a strong up move relative to previous bars, thus possibly locking in traders who went short which could help move prices higher once their stops begun to get run...creating a group of weak holders *****very conservative long entry, wait for low volume attempt to go down that fails after Bar#17 examples: Bar#43 & 44, fairly low volume with weak attempt to go down; Bar#19 is interesting too for this, though I assume a decent group of traders took some profits there, but that profit taking didn't turn into a change of sentiment, so perhaps a decent entry there as well. I'm a little foggy and tired, so I apologize in advance for the limited discussion I provided. Perhaps I'll add more later. And, yes, I understand that I chose all those bars in hindsight and that limits the true potency/substance of my analysis, however, the bars I chose do indeed follow, to the best of my knowledge, basic VSA principles. specifically I'm referring to 2 principles at the top and 2 at the bottom: a) hidden potential buying/selling (bar#11), b) no supply/demand (bar#16, 43, 44). I look forward to those with more experience in VSA to correcting & improving my commentary

quick, addition, that I just thought of. Another benefit to the sophisticated analysis is being able to take advantage of good opportunities (entries) more often. On the 5 min chart with volume analysis, we're waiting for certain conditions to present themselves to confirm entry/exit, this might've taken 15-25 minutes all together on the Dax chart. However, if we were able to track institutional sentiment more precisely perhaps entries would be possible that just seem too quick to react too on the 5 minute, ultimately permitting us to take more meat out of the market. just some thoughts.

Hi Shamal and Urmablume, Please correct me on what I'm missing. Shamal, I believe that while you're correct that high volume spikes on time based bars can show moments of capitulation and subsequent turns in the markets, to turn this information into a viable/actionable/successful trade has it's challenges in the realtime arena. This is where the precision analysis that Urmablume and friends-that I'm just beginning to ponder-comes in, and provides more mechanical precision in entering and exiting. When big "size" is on the line, this kind of precision is probably a real ally. In looking at your charts, the first 5min DAX chart, from my little exploration into VSA, I can say okay, ultra high volume coming in on an up move that closed in the middle with an very wide spread (supply overhead), this occuring at 15:00 and after a brief upward rally (potential turnaround), and I could also say: "I'll wait for a no demand low volume test or maybe an upthrust to confirm (or better both :-)) this potential weakness and enter the market short. We get that "no demand" bar 2 bars after the ultra high volume (kind of combined with an upthrust feature), and I could say I'd enter short on the close of that bar. And, although this commentary is all hindsight and hindsight in trading is both 20/20 but also "Fantasy", so although all that is hindsight, technically I'd be following preset rules of VSA looking for certain high volume and subsequent low volume and certain features in price ranges for my entry...and maybe the trade would work out. This might work for me and my 4 lot trading reality. However, if I'm a bigger fish, trading 100-500 lots, this kind of mental guess work interpreting the time bars and the volume bars is not going to give me enough confidence to enter that trade. But, what if I could spot the trail of very big fish establishing a campaign to take the market down, and this trail has more data variables than just simple volume over 5min (such as trade speed, certain patterns in the tape, certain patterns as in less variability in the amount of DepthOfMarket of lower bid orders--i.e. very big fish preparing to receive sell orders below the market) than just simple volume over 5min, to give me a fine grained continuum of confident-to-work to less-likely-to-work...all of this would give me much more confidence to pull the trigger or sit aside...and all of this needs the assistance of a computer to establish an interpretation that is actionable, especially with size on the line. Okay, I'm looking forward to Urma and the more experienced to step in and correct me and fill in the blanks. Thanks again to all for such a wonderfully rich forum. Urma thanks again in advance for your presence here and your willingness to share. -best wishes and prosperous trading, Brian

Hi everyone, I wanted to chime in with a few thoughts: 1. My trading buddy loves Tradestation for backtesting and developing strategies and has been doing so with nothing but praise for around 2 years. He recently told me how psyched he was that TS's backtesting feature allowed you to tweak the order fill parameters to make getting your fill a bit more realistic. I, currently, use Thinkorswim as my trading and charting platform, and they plan to offer backtesting on their updated platform in the near future. Though my hunch is it won't be as robust as TS or Neoticker, but still worth visiting their cool free archives about. 2. In addition to Urma's awesome and professional trading group liking Tradestation, another serious trading group that really likes tradestation's testing features are the good folks at Hawkeye Traders (you can look up their website). They have developed innovative (not as innovative as Urma's software imho) ways of strategy testing in TS that they call "Hawkeye Flex Strategy". And, in webinars when asked about various software packages, their founder Nigel Hawkes prefers tradestation too. I don't think I have to mention this, but I wrote about Hawkeye here not as an ad for them but rather as a "hey, go read these guy's free material, it might inspire some new backtesting techniques/ways of using backtesting software,etc...ideas"-kind of thing. 3. I wish folks would reserve strong accusations towards posters when there is really something blatant that's not appropriate. I know it's only text, but I can feel the anger and the mean energy coming through the words in some of the posts towards Urma. As far as offering testomonials and stopping that, while I understand the need to protect the site from unsponsored vendors, we are all offering the "testomonial" of our experience in this thread; the danger I see is that the more folks are trigger happy with accusations, the more restricted one might feel in expressing themselves, and then things just get awkward. I understand that folks have to express themselves when an insight or opinion arises; also, I understand that at this site it's important to maintain an integrity regarding no vendor promo and all that . I am just suggesting that it could be done in a friendly manner in keeping with building friendships and community. Such as asking a question rather than accusing with sarcasm, and/or attempting to first assume that everyone's here to learn and share and realize that due to the inherent problems in language in not being able to fully communicate reality--and the compounding of us all using computer text here and how that limits our communicative abilities...perhaps considering how limited our language tools are here in cyberspace can humble us a little and make for more gentle and friendly posts towards one another. -best wishes to all, B:cool:

has anyone looked at tick volume for thin/thickness?

Hi all, Best wishes to all. I wanted to chime in and say that I've had the privilege recently of watching most of the educational material by Tom Williams, Sebastian Manby, Todd Krueger, and Gavin Holmes (all currently and Todd formerly of Tradeguider). And, I wanted to communicate that I've learned tons by watching their unique approaches to the markets. It's like previous posters have said that each technique will provide an edge and also, different approaches (i.e. Tom William's VSA) will appeal to different folk's trading personalities. For example, the trader Sebastian Manby is an interesting fellow, who pays no attention to fundamental news whatsoever and uses no trendlines nor support/resistance on his charts at all. Only thing on his charts are high/low/close bars and volume-and this forms the basis of his approach to VSA; he also usually turns the Tradeguider signals (Tom's dialog boxes) off. And he reads those charts bar by bar and trades Forex and eminis in this way, and will often trade around news events totally ignorant to what those events are and what their expected influence will be, which to me represents a great confidence in his method (more on this confidence thing later). He also videos all of his trades and goes over them again and again to refine his techniques. Gavin will uses many of Sebastian's techniques plus pivot points, support/resistance, a volatility trending system, and volume & the hi/lo/close bars... For me, being a 2 year novice in the markets, watching Sebastian's very simple chart approach was somewhat of a revolution, the idea being that one's own mind can be the best analyze of the basic price & volume data. Now, obviously I haven't seen these men's bank account statements, however, after watching them teach, trade, and analyze charts for hours and hours, I will say that they are extremely confident in their approach to the markets, and that confidence is what will really make a mediocre or great technique truly shine. There are tons of examples of this among traders who have the oddest of techniques that many will say are absolute rubbish, however due to their confidence in the techniques and the great match that the given technique(s) have with the traders' personality (very important), they simply work. An interesting fellow in this regard is Dr. Al Larson over at Moneytide.Com, who daytrades the ES using his own math models of Moon tidal energy waves occurring at different times and how they supposedly effect trader's emotions. I've sat in on trading sessions with Dr. Al, and he's great, his method works, it's crazy. I'll post a chart of his moon tide forecast, it's very interesting....but that's not my point, the point is Dr. Al likes moon tides, Tom Williams & Seb Manby & Gavin & Todd like their take on VSA, I like learning about tons of methods right now, and so on. I'm so thankful for this forum, very good folks here posting great perspectives, keep up the great work everyone. -best wishes, B

Hi Guys, I'm new here, and I've been pondering the volume splitter and wanted to add an idea. First, thank you all for upholding such a refreshingly good vibe sharing/learning space. I believe another important variable in making a volume splitter useful is how it would "attempt" to calculate whether the big traders are "net long" or "net short"...so, I believe that it might be good to include a type of "cumulative" function. For example, you could code it to show the sum of buy/sell orders starting at market open...so as the indicator line progresses, it "attempts" to show whether folks are net long throughout the trading session. another cumulative idea, would be to show the total buy/sell volume during each pivot cycle, so it would have a kind of adaptive average accumulation of buy/sell volume...and another idea would be to cleverly include both ideas. I'm not a coder yet, just a trader and student of market techniques. Looking forward to you folk's input. -best wishes, B