bh_trade

Dogpile: I have enjoyed reading this thread. You recently pointed out the market's tendency to chop around and build large volume around a particular price before trending away from that area. This concept was something I never paid any attention to but after reading this thread I now notice it on (nearly) a daily basis. Yesterday for example, we built some nice volume in the 1508 area before negative up/dn volume completely took over and the bottom dropped out. BTW, I also enjoyed your prior thread with outlook/chat on the weekly ES action. In a nutshell, thanks for your contributions.

My indicator may have missed the bearish setup earlier, but it is flagging the potentially bullish one you identified. After hours had pretty hefty downside penetration of the support line, but I noticed your data is day session. Perhaps if the market stabilizes some overnight and opens near today's closing price I would feel better about taking the trade, but right now I would not be inclined due to after hours weakness taking price below support.

That was indeed a beautiful, almost textbook Wolfewave. What charting package? TS by chance? I typically use 1500 share for ER2 but tried to replicate using 466tick chart and Clyde Lee's Wolfewave indicator but it did not pick up that pattern this afternoon on either the 1500 share or 466 tick. Not only would you have had a nice, low risk entry point against that upper wedge, you would have had negative advance decline and pathetically negative up/dn volume supporting the trade, it was almost bulletproof. Man, I wish my indicator would have picked up that pattern today as I surely would have taken the trade.

This response is quite late, but I recently purchased a market profile indicator from don disharoon, email is dondish@erols.net It neatly plots market profile using day session data only and includes a side indicator showing the developing value area high/low/poc on minute bars. I believe he offers a one week free trial. FYI: You cannot merge days nor does the indicator work on overnight sessions, but his price is very fair.

The shorts triggered today always struggled. Too many short coverers and wannabe longs providing bidside support into the partial fill of today's opening gap. Curious, are you paper trading these or actual $$?

"If you don;t mind my asking what broker do you use? Both that I use cannot calculate the required margin for the Russell mini on the Globex platform. and that started on August 17th, the same date that ICE officially took over. Here's the PDF that was emailed to me when I questioned about it:" I chart and trade using Tradestation and have had zero problems with ER2 lately. I truly thought the changeover wasn't until Aug 2008. I read your attached file. Perhaps they are trading concurrently right now? But I know my feed and my executions are going through CME. Have not noticed a significant volume decrease either. I am eyeing a new contract to trade, been leaning towards YM, but I seek a similar tick value/daily range relationship and nothing else comes close. So until a noticeable change of character takes place in ER2 (slower volume and/or liquidity issues) I will stick with ER2 for now.

Am I missing something? ER2 still trades on CME, o at least I do every day. The change takes place in Aug 2008 not 2007

Jerry: I would like to thank you for this entire series of very enlightening threads. I am a Tradestation user and have been trying to look at the markets intraday using the VWAP/PVP concepts discussed in earlier threads. It is difficult to visually keep up with the TS matrix as a substitute for a price/volume histogram indicator right on the chart. The other thing I have noticed is that indeed PVP jumps all over the place many times throughout the day and seemingly would lead to difficulty in consistent trading. Perhaps that is due to my untrained eye.

dbntina: Thank you for posting this. I had always wanted an indicator that provided statistical representation of what was happening today. Nice job!

I trade the ER2 almost exclusively. Thanks for posting this info Brownsfan. Now I'm thinking additional real time feed and possible liquidity issues initially. Why can't they just leave well enough alone . . .

Quite simply, the opening range is the highest price and the lowest price traded from the open to X minutes later. Many people look at 15min opening range, others 30,60,etc. It is only known after the fact, nobody can predict the opening range before it happens. But you are correct Carter, many *react* later in the morning to opening range breakouts.

The offer a free Hawkeye volume indicator which colors volume bars based on their VSA criteria.

I think I can answer your question. For most people, myself included, it is easier to be methodical and disciplined when trading a contract size you are comfortable with. I trade ER2 exclusively for a living and my scale in/out size is 2-8 contracts, never trade less than 2, never more than 8. My account size has grown significantly since I began and I know I should "step it up" so to speak. Problem is, I have become comfortable with the risk I take and "stepping up" that risk would make me more emotional than I care to be. Something I need to work on for sure.

I don't avoid trading on Mondays and Friday's but I certainly expect less from the markets on those days. Generally speaking Mondays and Friday's have been choppy-sideways lately so I would be careful about breakout trading. Seems they are more suited to rangebound trading styles where the larger intraday trend moves tend to happen on Tue-Thu.

Ask Bob Prechter about predicting tops using Elliott Wave. Dude got bearish in 1997 and still is today. Of course Feb 27 was supposed to be the start of some great new bear market, but predictably his short-term analyst has slowly capitulated on the bearish view. 3 (not C) down was *supposed* to be confirmed starting on 3/29. Then the market rallied the next 7 days and the analyst went with a B up preferred count, with the elusive yet potent C down yet to come. Problem was too many bears looking for C down. As of yesterday he finally gave up and basically said "well crap, I guess we are in a 5th wave up". Someday it will end badly because of the parabolic nature of the rise, but man, selling weakness over the last month or so has truly been the kiss of death.

BrownsFan: Ok, I admit, not a candlestick guy, never have been. More of a price structure (higher highs, lows, trendlines, etc) guy. TS works for me and I don't pay for the platform because I do in excess of 100 RT's per month. They have some quirks for sure, but then again, every platform will. If precise volume bars are important to you then you probably need to swith platforms. BTW, no offense was ever intended. Best of luck in your trading.

No, I understand what you guys are saying about the volume bars. And I also said I *have* used and traded from volume bars. My main trading vehicle is ER2 so the volume bar differentials are very minor. I suppose if you are charting equities which can have wider per tick volume differential then I can see where your larger 20% error factor comes in. Now I guess what I dont "get" is how or why a 500 volume bar vs a 600 volume bar is such a big deal when making your trading decisions. I mean price is what it is - right?

Um, I use TS to actually trade futures for a living, not to worry about the relatively minor semantics of volume bar shortcomings. And yes, I have traded using volume bars, but I mainly use tick bars with Tick Delta as my volume indicator. Regardless, a price chart is a price chart.

Guess I'm not worried about little stuff like that. What's more troubling with TS is from time to time (like most of this morning) their time and sales (dom) bid/ask data lags the market. The last trade price is correct but many times today have seen last trade blatantly through a bid/ask so right now I don't trust their bid/ask data. Now that bothers me.

Actual volume is usually *very* close to the volume bar setting, i.e. very close to constant volume, within a handful of shares on my charts. I was unable to enlarge your chart so I could not see the actual numbers but I suspect the reason the volume subgraph "looks" so spikey is due to scaling, meaning a 510 share bar might look like a huge spike on the subgraph when in reality it is less than 2% difference from ideal.

I cannot compare TS to other platforms, but will tell you that the TS commissions on minis is just under $5/rt. Do at least 10 rt's per month and the platform fee is waived, i.e. you pay only for real-time data feeds. I have no complaints with them