Brookwood

I'm not against Fibs altogether.The idea of percentage retracement can be useful but they seem to have more utility on longer-term chart than I trade on.Good to know about, but ultimately for me, a distraction.So, to bring the topic back around, just getting rid of everything on the charts that's not helping you make money- keeping it as simple as you possibly can.

Just a quick one of very many: Stopped using Fibonacci levels. That was major, since, as a noob, I had been trained to put so much emphasis on that. It just points to the bigger issue which is to look at price and not get caught up in imaginary lines and indicators.

A nice lady called today and asked "Will you be sending your forms in today?" I explained that no,I was ready to send in what they had asked for originally but it would take at least a few days to get the rest of the additional info, and it would have been nice to have been apprised of everything that would be needed in the first place. Turns out my partner did not even need to sign the original forms to return to them. Just the new ones."Your broker must have misinformed you." I don't think even they know what is going on or what is needed. Classic! Glad we could vent! :crap:

:deal: Lol- I won't ask! Thanks for taking the time to share your experiences. If I could take care of all this in an afternoon I wouldn't mind so much but because of some particulars it might add another three weeks to open the account and by the language of their boilerplate they are being cagey about even opening it then. -sigh- I may just poke around for one of the "easier" brokers... Cheers, BW

I've opened personal futures accounts from discount brokers in the past without much fuss. But I'm getting annoyed with my new potential broker for the following reasons: First they just needed basic paperwork that could mostly be completed online. Then they needed non- facsimile signatures from the principals so I had to wait for those to come back in the mail from other States. Now I need to send them personal bank statements, personal guarantees for liabilities, I need to amend my bylaws on the company letterhead to conform to their legalese,to be signed by all parties which means more trips to the bank, more mail, they wonder why the brand new company has had no income, and more. Then they "MAY" open the account! Is this standard procedure for opening a LLC account? My account is small but it will be over 20x the day trading margins, (and don't brokers have real-time margin cutoffs in place if they are so worried? ) So, many more delays that they incrementally add instead of letting me know up front all I would need, plus crawling up my butt with a flashlight which no one seemed to care about for a plain, self-directed account. I've already initialed 39 pages of forms, they have my tax ID number- WHAT GIVES?? I just wanted to post here first before I call the broker because I'm feeling things could get off on the wrong foot... They are one of the few brokers that offers my preferred platform which is the reason I'm clinging to the idea of using them. Thanks in advance for any perspective you may have on this issue (ie. is this normal procedure?)

You are looking at the London Open.And its GBP that's what is moving units, not the Swissy. The Pound is quite a thinly traded currency and back when I was trading it, had quite a reputation for running stops. Every morning at the open it would find the stops in one direction, then the other, then decide what to do for the day which was usually a 100 pip directional move.So to answer your question, the open is where the most money changes hands and the Pound is easy to push around by the pros with big $$$.Congrats on finding a good strategy to trade it, but I don't think it's CHF thats doing the work.

well the above post only shows the cap link in IE.wtf? But anyway I found my answer- for some reason I thought the TWS server had delayed data but it is simulated, and not very well. :crap: Carry on!

Screencap of 15m bars

After paper trading (again) for some time, I'm evaluating brokers/platforms. Using the TWS feed for the first time (with ZeroLine trader front end) it looked like WWIII had broken out on the YM contract. 1m bars were ranging 100 ticks. My buy stop netted 400 ticks in 5 minutes! Woohoo! Sadly, not only was the range offset from reality by ~ 1000 ticks, the volume of each bar was almost identical, a la constant range/volume bars. As far as I know demo data is delayed, but the YM September contract had the correct time stamp on the T&S. Are they using fantasy data? I made a movie this morning of TOS vs. IB Dom and T&S. I'd appreciate a nudge in the right direction if I've completely missed the boat on this. It's difficult to make a meaningful eval under these conditions. http://www.screencast.com/users/Brookwood/folders/Jing/media/58abed6a-5d6a-4f47-a04f-786ac75fce50

Go to "edit studies" and select "new study".Paste the body from the text file you downloaded into the code area, making sure to paste over the default text. Name and save your study. Voila! Cheers, Brookwood

Thanks to the Google I found a template for a UVOL/DVOL indicator.I'm not a programmer but I rolled up my sleeves this weekend and cut and past... er...made some indicators for up minus down volume on the thinkorswim platform.:missy: UDV1 plots up-down volume on a positive-negative scale with a user adjustable moving average. UDV2 is exactly the same except the plot is the absolute value histogram with the MA tracking the absolute value as well (ie; the MA does not go negative.) I like this one better because you can better compare day-to-day ranges and can see "breakouts" of the previous day's +- volume range. credit for the originals is in the source code. They work best when charts are set to "show trading hours only" but not necessary. They don't seem to work on tick charts. Included is an example chart of ES with both indicators shown. Please remember the source data is NYSE up-down volume (not the underlying bid/ask volume) so putting the indicator on commodity chart may offer unpredictable results. To get them into TOS: open the text file in a word processor (wordpad is fine), then select all and copy.Instructions in second pic for after you select "edit studies" in TOS. Cheers, Brookwood UDV1&2.zip

In an effort to make something simple more complicated (until I can make a true UVOL/ UVOL-DVOL indicator) here is my chop-trend indicator.It uses the correlation of UVOL-DVOL and the channel tool to draw the boundaries. At the top of the range UVOL-DVOL are highly correlated ie. moving in tandem which equals chop. At the bottom of the range they are highly uncorrelated which equals trend or at least lack of chop. The trick would be to enter your trade when the volumes diverge when its coming down from the top of the range.It does not show direction-that depends on which is ahead-up or down volume. It is set to 30 minutes in the picture based on a one minute chart. 60 seems to work nicely as well, but all are untried in combat conditions. I'm just throwing it out there if someone may find it useful and to further the thread.

Thanks Head2K and lordbinder and of course MC! edeeb- this thread is really about Market Internals and not so much about divergence per se. Do a google search for market internals ,AD ratio, and TRIN. UVOL/DVOL is showing an aspect of what is actually happening in the broader market at that moment and is not a mean reversion indicator like CCI.

Thanks for the posts. I came across this method when OpenTick was down for a server relocation and I needed alternative internals.Do anyone know which data provider may have an UVOL/DVOL ratio calculated like the ADD (advancers/decliners) ratio? Or which platform may allow the ratio to be programmed /calculated as a single line

Thanks for the replies. Mr.Ed has distilled my question correctly. (And yes, I'm a Mr. as well.)Forget the software aspect- I have now seen with two separate methods that price can rise when there is more volume and sales at the bid, and vice versa. So consider this a straight-up T&S question. This phenomenon probably even has a name. I understand the concept of spoofing but this is recorded sales not bluffing. Haven't you Naked chart T&S guys seen this?? Since I'm new at order flow I doubt what I'm seeing with my own eyes or think I must be interpreting things incorrectly.Thanks in advance for your thoughts. :\

I too am trying to learn T&S, and to that end am evaluating market profile-type software that lets you see Bid/Ask volume at each price level on a bar chart. My question relates to what I'm seeing in the cumulative volume delta and Bid/Ask/Sales for each candle. On a regular T&S window many times I've seen tons of small prints and block sales at the bid and price goes nowhere yet a few small sales on the ask and price moves up. Also the reverse. I'm seeing this on the demo software too- YM trades down all morning on decent volume but at some point around 10:30 AM there is a 60 point rally but I'm seeing only negative volume delta for every single 3m bar and the bid is getting hit at 5 times the ask.How is price going up if the "tape" shows only selling by any objective measure?What else moves price besides hitting the bid or ask? :\