joshdance

We are at that juncture where the market will seek to cause as much pain to as many traders as possible. I would not be surprised to see a shakeout down. Likely the shorts from earlier have already been experiencing pain, so now it's the other side's turn potentially. No bias here. Trouble area from this morning for bulls. If they can't take it higher here, could be a nice move down.

Or if you're considering globex, 46.50 was the VPOC earlier and now is already shifted back

Tom, I think the tide has already shifted to the long side. If you watch delta, at 11:20-11:30EST look how the buying took over. One final wash at 11:43 and it was official, IMO, particularly as here delta stayed very positive -- in other words, on the wash, it was a good mix of market buying and market selling. IMO we have seen the low of the day. Buyers happy to buy this drift higher, no waiting for retracements. TICKs healthy, delta steadily rising. If they will buy with the volume they did at 12:19, at 1341, why would they not buy again there? Who knows, but that's my take. It's time for a pullback here somewhere I would think, but I do not see it yet.

I captured and uploaded this about an hour ago to screencast (11:31am), and it dipped below a little, but could this be a test of post-NFP peak volume before moving up higher? Honestly the volume isn't quite convincing at the moment, but there has been pretty heavy buying since the low so we'll see. I see that N posted a 3 day profile, this is basically the same thing.

Seems pretty easy to me to define what HFT is. A "normal" human trade cycle of open and close will take no less than half of a second. Do some research perhaps, and determine some basic human limitation for speed of execution. Anything beneath that is HFT. Perhaps it's closer to 0.1 seconds for humans. It would be like determining a normal human reflex or response time for something like moving out of the way of an incoming object. Do the same for trading, and it will work if they then want to do something with HFT activity.

Steve, this is a fallacy of causation. You are presuming that because the market moved when he said something, that his comment was the cause, or impetus which caused traders to move the market. Perhaps it was, but one does not imply the other. Perhaps you missed the prior 20 or so minutes to this comment where the market sold off below yesterday's low, came back above aggressively, and held. Traders were already buying the market. I mentioned this in the thread you reference BEFORE his comment was made. It was clear. Go and read it, 10:22am, 20 minutes before this -- no Bernanke comments necessary to see. Furthermore, after reviewing the testimony, Bernanke said nothing of substance in this answer. He did not indicate any action, or any intention to do anything. He basically said that if current law stayed the same and taxes increased (among other things) on Jan 1 2013, that it would slow the recovery, and he gave supporting CBO data regarding projected unemployment and GDP. He even reiterated his "strong advocacy for maintaining fiscal sustainability in the longer term" -- then basically said the obvious, as he does very well, that as Jan 1 2013 gets closer, congress would need to be given a clear road map as to how to proceed. Bernanke is not affiliated with the CBO, legislation, tax cuts, or any of that stuff, and even if he were, he did not say anything out of the ordinary there. It's a typical Bernanke answer that's carefully worded to avoid a strong reaction. Tell me steve, when you step on a crack on the sidewalk and people die somewhere, did you kill them? Correlation is NOT causation. Better yet steve, go and look at the video again ( http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/USEconomicOutlook21 ) ... as Senator Sessions prefaces his question with a typically political statement regarding the dreadful situation of the u.s. economy, the market sells strongly at 10:03:22 ... did the market not know something about the economy that the senator enlightened us with? Did they not like his question? Or when the market bought at 10:11am EST, a senator stood up in his chair to point at a chart. Did the market see something they liked that suddenly caused a flurry of buying? Maybe they liked his pants he was wearing? The market had already started buying, and it was continuation. Seriously, do you not get it? Are so many "professionals" :rofl: so logically challenged?

s&p cash high so far 1349 ... it may try one more point, but 5 points higher may be pushing it

This is a good point. I've found that when I pass on a great trade idea, it's for fear of being wrong about my logical premise. If I lose, then I'm wrong about my good idea. Yet, if I then take a poor, low probability opportunity, I can almost sense immediately that it's a bad idea but I stay with it--because at least I get to be right about it being such a dumb idea. Perhaps that sounds ridiculous, but it's not about losing money, it's about being right or wrong. By the way Rande, I want to say thank you for your posts as well. I am sorry that you get a lot of attacks and take a lot of heat for what you post, but I think ultimately the cause of this is that you are a self-admitted non-trader. You don't actually trade, so people don't respect your advice, no matter how valuable it may be. If you came from a place of actually having put into action what you are preaching in the markets, I think you would realize how much of what you say is either true or not, from a personal perspective. Sure, Tiger Woods' coach is not as good as Tiger Woods and can coach him, but I'll bet you that he has actually picked up a club and played a round or two before.

You're attributing the market moving to Bernanke's comment. Maybe this time it did. The market's dynamics are too complex to attribute to any one event, but perhaps this time someone in the market cared enough to click the buy button at his ambiguous, irrelevant apolitical comment. If you call that a "tradeable opportunity" then more power to you, hope it continues to work for you.

Double posting since you did as well steve: This is one of many Bernanke testimonies, press conferences, etc., and if you think that him saying that caused the market to respond in some meaningful way, I think you've lost your mind, to put it bluntly and nicely. He says things like this all of the time, and Bernanke is VERY good at remaining generally apolitical in his comments. He crafts his comments in such a way that it will NOT cause ripples, if you listen to how he responds. The market tried to break beneath yesterday's low. Buyers held it, and pushed it back above. The market was primed for a run to the top of this range already, and Mr. Bernanke's comments had minimal impact. In fact, look on the "Day trading emini futures" thread and you'll see that I recognized the order flow shift, BEFORE this was said. The market is very well aware that he and the FOMC are responsible for monetary policy, which is why they pay attention to those matters; they don't give a rat's butt about his politically correct comments in which he stays out of matters regarding legislation.

You didn't link to your post but I found it near the bottom anyway, and I assume that's what you're referring to. This is one of many Bernanke testimonies, press conferences, etc., and if you think that him saying that caused the market to respond in some meaningful way, I think you've lost your mind, to put it bluntly and nicely. He says things like this all of the time, and Bernanke is VERY good at remaining generally apolitical in his comments. He crafts his comments in such a way that it will NOT cause ripples, if you listen to how he responds. The market tried to break beneath yesterday's low. Buyers held it, and pushed it back above. The market was primed for a run to the top of this range already, and Mr. Bernanke's comments had minimal impact. Did you see my post at 10:22 regarding the order flow shift that I observed, BEFORE the comments you're referring to, before 36 was even broken to the upside? The market is very well aware that he and the FOMC are responsible for monetary policy, which is why they pay attention to those matters; they don't give a rat's butt about his politically correct comments in which he stays out of matters regarding legislation.

Interesting development guys -- we broke confidently BACK UP into yesterday's range, after breaking below it. It looks to me that we are back into buy only mode right now. If we really wanted to test the 20s, wasn't this our best shot? 1342+ it is, from my perspective on things. A good little jolt down would be expected, but unless we can really dig below 33.75 again, to the moon I say.

Well, for practical purposes it's not a deal breaker, but it potentially skews statistics, particularly if the one minute prior to the open has a lot of volume. Also, the "Open" value of the profile is certainly going to be incorrect a lot. Not the end of the world, but I'm going to try to see if I can get Chad to look at it again, since you have replicated it.

There is no "correct" way to display a futures contract. A chart which shows gaps will be incorrect regarding high to low swings. A chart which splices together will fix this, but will show prices which potentially never traded. In fact, each data vendor will present a different view of a continuous back-adjusted contract (such as I'm using), if they even offer one. Hence, if you want a REAL picture of what traded, the only way is to look at the cash market and base your longer term views on that. This is one reason I really don't put much weight into a price that traded several years ago -- not everyone sees the same thing. The cash is the only true picture, which we have no real volume at price data available for.

Thanks for the reply Tom -- I'm always interested when profile-based traders talk about volume nodes this way, as IMO once it's been "run over" on the way up and down several times, it really is not that significant to me, particularly since it's so minuscule in relation to the 4 or so year length of your profile.

Tom, you mentioned 1236.50 was a CLVN. I'm curious as to how you (or anyone else) would use this idea to get long when you did. I'm assuming you mean this is a CLVN from a very long term profile? It had no significance really at the time on the day so far. It was near the developing VAL , but ...so what? The volume activity showed a possible nice entry there, but again, it was not important on the way up, so curious as to why you consider it important as a CLVN on a retrace. I see it as a good re-entry point for a long, given its location at 50% of the prior minor swing up, and given the volume activity, and in this environment I was looking to be long all day, not short at all, so I like the direction. But it's the CLVN part that I'm questioning. If one looks at a long term profile, there are a bajillion prices that one can look at and pinpoint as possibly significant. I would like to see your profile that you're referring to if you can post it, so I can see what you see there.

The webinar was not recorded guys; I appreciate Predictor getting up to do the webinar on a Saturday morning. But it started 20 minutes late, did not get to the real material for another 30 minutes (the usual "who I am" and sales pitch), and after that had some good ideas but nothing that you probably haven't heard before. The gist is that in tape reading, he feels volume itself is pretty useless, and so is the time, so he looks only at the price quotes. I don't think I'm giving too much away here. But there were some ideas presented and I am appreciative of that and did learn some things. Have a look at Predictor's collective2 system and see how it's performed and see if you like the trades he has taken. Some of them are good, some are not. But he's not teaching a "system" or a "method" really in this webinar. I suppose you could purchase some of his material and see more practical examples of what he does, but there was not one actual market example given in this free webinar. I completely understand and agree that if Predictor has something that works for him, that he should charge for it if he feels that others will have a piece of his edge. However, what he does appears largely to be VERY discretionary, so as usual, I doubt much of what he teaches will become practically usable in the near term if you view his material. I just wanted to respond to this since four people have asked about the webinar recording and wanted to demystify things. I would think Predictor would have come onto this thread the minute he had technical difficulties (if it was possible) and post that he was running late, and answer questions regarding the webinar recording, but in his absence I'm trying to provide some transparency here. In case anyone thinks that his personal trading will somehow magically get better after attending this webinar, well, I suppose it's possible, but how many webinars have you attended before that really changed your life?

Here is the problem I'm having: 2012-02-06_1628 - joshtrader's library

N, I have a favor to ask you if you have a minute right after the session closes at 4:15 today. I have observed what I think is a small bug in IRT that Chad wasn't able to reproduce, and I'm curious if you are able to. It should be simple to test: Create a 1 minute ES chart, only need to show 2 or 3 days worth of data. Make this a RTH chart. Insert the profile indicator, using the 3 period custom settings, 1020 minutes, and 405 minutes. Right click the profile, and "show data" -- note the total volume, and the open price. Now change it to an ETH chart. Again note the total volume, and open price. They should match -- do they, on yours? What is the volume difference in the two, and what is the open for both? It would greatly help me if you don't mind. It is best done when the market is closed from 4:15 to 4:30.

booyah. We are around 30% lower than 20d median volume (an already dismal relative volume at that) still, all day long, 6 point high to low range. I would say that the number of large organizations putting anything into this market today so far are somewhere between zero and none. This is the "pay your broker and the exchange" market.

For those of you who like statistics..

Twice pushed off of yesterday's VAL .. but on the touch of yesterday's close, there was quite a surge of volume. From that we can infer very little, except that there was participation. However, if I were looking short, in this case, I'd rather see less participation than more, and subsequently an increase in selling. We have not had that, so I will stay biased long, on this little pennant forming here.

Well we got our gap fill (39, friday's settlement), but NQ seems unwilling to leave its overnight range so far, and the dow doesn't seem too happy to do so either. At 10:47am we got a nice surge of buying and good TICK reading, just at the open, after a lazy pullback, so that was a reasonable long opportunity, but of course aren't they all in hindsight. EDIT: on a side note, I see that Bernanke testifies tomorrow, and speaks on Friday. Truly, what can he say that he has not already said? I don't mind the news creating movement, but it's just kind of silly.

We are 30% lower than 20 day median volume as of 11:03am EST, in a 4.75 RTH range for 1.5 hours, and are sitting very comfortably within yesterday's range, not eager at the moment to push either side of its range. Anything can be next here. If I have an opinion, I am slightly long biased as delta is long for the day, and we are in a bull market for several months and for this year. However, with what's going on right now, best for me to be flat here.

Ummm, was this a joke, or what? Is this what I got up on Saturday morning for? Was looking forward to learning.