joshdance

Each chart type has its own advantages and disadvantages. Range bars allow the trader to focus on ranges of price, by eliminating time and volume. Volume bars allow the trader to focus on price based in the activity (volume) of the market, by eliminating time. Time bars allow the trader to focus on price over a period of time, by eliminating volume. Tick bars allow the trader to focus on transactions, by eliminating time. Renko, Kase, Point and figure, all of them have their own use. No bar type is "superior" just as no time frame or market or trading platform or anything else is "superior." Each has its own purpose, and as long as it's used for that purpose, it can be the right tool for the job. And don't let anyone tell you that a certain type of chart is superior or inferior in the broad sense. It's a case of "my religion is better than yours," and it's either self-delusion or marketing.

Sorry, my typo, I circled and intended 9:34am PT, 12:34pm ET. What was the actual indicator value (highest reading) at the 7:21am PT time? (as 7:00 was news anyway) Your reading at 9:34 was 180K. Would love to compare the values.

Circled area is the area UB posted, at 7:34pst, with POT indicator. UB, would love to see your chart at 7am PT, as well as 7:21am PT. Or is this screen shot as your web site says where you sell your indicators:

Isn't the simple conclusion that two computer programs are trading with each other? One reloads the bid, the other is selling at the market. They fire thousands of orders per second. This happens all day, every day. Or perhaps I'm not understanding what you're talking about.

From UB's web site: Just another vendor selling a useless indicator. Mods, is there no requirement to be identified as a vendor on TL when someone clearly is promoting a product by posting numerous screen shots of it over a long period of time, and publicly selling that product through links in his profile?

Good point BlowFish--the "magical" POC is nothing magical at all. As an aside, if enough people adopt a strategy based on fading the day's (or yesterday's, or..) POC, for example, then it ceases to work. Can you give an example of the kind of tool you're referring to?

Sounds like too many things to watch. POC, VAH, VAL, Pivot, S1, R1, etc., key levels from yesterday or the week, mid-points (c'mon?), consolidations, .... too much info. You're going to have a minimum of 12-15 lines, probably all within a relatively small range. Perhaps that's why you say it's difficult to remember to look for most of these. Would love to hear about your progress with this, hopefully start a separate thread for this.

Understood and not really asking anyway, as I don't trade these. I can see how they are very valuable pieces of information. I simply meant that just trading a tick divergence alone is bound to fail, but then again so is anything else I suppose taken on its own without context or other supporting data to make a good decision.

In what way tradewinds? I know some traders who swear by tick and tickq and other breadth indicators, but if simple tick divergence was really "predictive" by any stretch, it wouldn't really be an edge at all would it? I don't trade the indices much, but I would suppose that if I did I would want to use tick as another source of input to give some confirmation.

How about looking at the context, volume trends, and what the price bars themselves are telling you about where the market wants to go, based on what it has done recently? Anything can change at any moment so prediction is not possible, but use this information, combine it with the current market "mood" (is volume increasing right now, after it moves is there follow through, is the market indecisive, whipping back and forth, or has it established a clear direction..?). This is not easy, and I am still struggling with being able to have confidence in my read on the market, though it is right more often than not. I believe it takes time, experience, a decent working model of how the market moves, and even then it is still a challenge at times I'm sure.

daVinci, Right on--keep up the good work.

Agree 200% -- I don't use indicators, and think that they generally handicap the trader. I also am myself learning how to be a trader, not a system or indicator follower. I'm with you more than you can possibly imagine daVinci. And I don't like the idea of automated systems, particularly those run by people who hit internet forums with their spam. For every trade example you post where the "selling dried up" and price reversed as it did in your example, I'll find you another where it did just that, and then just kept on going (see oil today for numerous examples of what seems to be buyer exhaustion, yet price marches on upward). You're finessing your entries, which is all well and good, and would be ideal for me as well. And I agree that the ES trade you posted was a fantastic entry, with very low, quantified risk. But you're looking at a tiny time frame on this. The trade you took from their web site doesn't look quite so "ridiculous" if looked at in the larger context (see attached picture). You are trading off a hunch that price will go the other way. A good hunch, perhaps, but a hunch all the same, with less information that if you had waited for more confirmation. This is a lower probability entry. Your reward for this increased risk of failure is that your monetary risk is more quantified and smaller. The entry given on the web site you mention has a larger monetary risk, but at the point of entry the market had more clearly shown its hand, that it in fact was rejecting yesterday's close and was read to move higher. It's a trade-off either way, there is no perfect way to enter the market. And that was my point, and only that. Not to say that either way was right or wrong. Did you enter long as you were watching this (if you were watching)? In real time these bottom- and top-picks are not quite as easy as in hindsight. I mean, looking at your PnF chart, all I can say is "duh"-- but emotionally, it's a little harder to take the trade, with real money on the line, and for those with the balls to do so, their reward is a small loss if they're wrong. EDIT: I do agree that the stop is a bit large perhaps, a more conservative stop would be below the low of the day, but that's obvious in hindsight. By the way, do you think longer-term position and swing traders really enter a trade with a 2 point stop? I'm not one so I can't speak personally to this, but something tells me the answer is no, due to their longer time frame perspective. The chart you posted shows at least a week's worth of data, where 2 points is noise.

Sure, that's why they moved his thread. Because he was SO good. He was SO good and SO profitable that he had to charge $400, then $1500. He was SO good that he had to charge money to others to reveal his secrets of trading. I suppose this crap will never end on trading forums, pulling in unsuspecting gullible people thinking that the holy grail is just around THIS corner, even though it didn't work the last 25 times. Yet another 3-post poster promoting someone's snake oil.

Carl, thanks for the post, and nice web site. But advertising here with only a few posts to your name will unfortunately not sit very well with many people, just so you know. Also, I'm not sure I agree with your ideas that program buying and selling are the cause of changes in supply and demand. Perhaps in some markets, but supply/demand principles have, as you know, existed long before computers, so I'm not sure what you're getting at with this.

"High" and "low" in relation to what? You alternative would I suppose be to "buy the low, sell the high" ... sounds great in theory--how do you determine the low and high? The poster is simply advocating entering in the direction the market is moving. Bottom- and top-pickers (some of those who buy the low, sell the high) are often fodder for the freight train of momentum and provide the needed liquidity for those in tune with the actual direction of the market. Hope you didn't "buy the low" a couple of weeks ago on oil every time it dropped.

Yes, but that's what the volume indicator at the bottom of the screen shows--it amalgamates volume. Or if you're interested in buy/sell volume, then that's what the delta indicator shows. It's my understanding that part of the intent of those who do this though is to determine what is a "large order," in other words, to show the actual intent of the initiator of the order--not just to summarize a series of orders which happen to come through at the same time. My contention is that while it may summarize orders, it can in no way show the intention of the person, institution, or computer that placed the order. Before the CME changed its reporting, the intent of a market order was shown, and was not split. Even then the intent could be hidden by splitting the order up in both size and time. Now that even a market order's intent is not shown in what is reported, how much more impossible is it to know whether orders are from a particular entity? It's simply not possible, and what matters more, IMO, is that there are orders, not where or who or "retail" or "institutional" or whatever. I'll add that I don't think it's a bad idea to do what's being done, just that the conclusions that are being drawn from what is shown on the "reconstructed t&s" are not necessarily valid. But if they help the trader, then by all means why not use it?

Isn't it making a false assumption (I want to say naive here but don't want to sound offensive) to think that all the orders that come in at the same price within a certain time period are from the same order? Put another way, if you were trying to cover your tracks, wouldn't you do something more than just split the order and push it through all at once? But my main point is still this: who cares how the order is split? I'm really agreeing with your first statement, that the "intensity" or "momentum" of the orders is far more important than if it comes from this source, or that source, or whatever.

As an aside, this is just in response to the above if anyone is wondering. In NT you can color the DOM any color you want in sim, to make it look live. Also, you can create a sim account with a number, so even if you show your DOM with the color and account number, it can be completely fake. The only way to prove trades taken is by posting them as they are taken, or in advance. That's just in response to this as clarification, now back to the topic at hand.

I agree steve. Why someone thinks that they can take orders interwoven into the mix by software that people spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on trying to hide their orders, and then write an indicator for ninjatrader that will automatically detect this, is beyond me. Especially using a timestamp. Really, as if they just do it sequentially all at one time? Yeah, that's a tough one to crack. Taking it one step further, why does it even matter? X number of contracts traded. Grouping people into "institutional," "smart money," "professionals," etc., based on size traded is fruitless. There is not enough "retail" or "dumb money" or whatever else you want to call it, volume to be on the other side of these orders to fill them all, so at the end of the day it's big money trading against big money, and someone will win, and someone will lose. Why not trade what you see, and forget trying to group a trade group as "smart" or "dumb" or "retail" or "institutional."

Why don't you just attach them to your post? ("Manage Attachments" at the bottom) Either way they just look like screen shots of someone trading, not even necessarily a live account, so not sure how they are relevant...

Though the answer is, "this is not possible, especially with a retail platform and tools," I ask, how so?

wooooooo hoooooooo!!

Giving the status of a trade already in the money 150 ticks doesn't really say much. I'm not doubting you took the short, the market was definitely weak overnight and near the open, but posting that you're short at 8:18, instead of 10:35, would perhaps give a little more weight to what you said, particularly as this would be before the inventories.

I said, "I'm sure you're NOT saying ..." ... I wanted to be clear on what you said, nothing more, nothing less. I'm not asking you to prove anything--you won't prove anything anyway, so I wouldn't ask you to. I was asking for clarification on a statement that was not clear to me. I didn't think that's what you meant, that's why I phrased the question that way. Are you looking for ways to take offense? Free isn't too expensive for me, but several thousand dollars paid to someone who will happily sell me "the system" is. Or is it several hundred? Meanwhile, I dusted off my programming skills and wrote a simple little program that will post my live trades to my twitter feed. I just wrote it yesterday, and it simply reads the NT log, and parses the lines where a trade is executed, and posts the relevant data to twitter within 2-3 seconds, not 2-3 hours or days as seems to be the trend with pretty much everybody, particularly vendors and "institutional" traders. It posts the trade execution only, not the limits or stops. The twitter page is http://twitter.com/joshtrader ... So far only those posting in the "reading charts in real time" thread do something similar, as did MM in his thread as well. Whether my trades are winners or losers is already a matter of public record on another site where I have a trading journal, so it's really nothing new, only these are posted as they happen. My thought, Logic, was, since I have nothing to prove just like you, then why not just put the trades out there? It will prove just what I said--that I have certainly been struggling the last few weeks with oil!

I'm sure you're not saying that a "TA oscillation" occurred before these catastrophies (9/11, london, earthquake) and in some way gave warning of a market reaction before the actual event occurred?