Recent content by steenbab

I have to agree with just about everyone on this thread: the market *shouldn't* be going higher based on fundamentals, and yet the wide-open spigot of liquidity seems to be finding a home in stocks. For me a determining factor has been the drying up of stocks making fresh new lows since...

Hello Nkhoi, I appreciate your sharing this with the group. I respectfully request, however, that you take my personal email off your post and instead simply have interested parties contact me through the blog. I will receive much unwanted spam once the "spiders" pick up my email from your...

Hi Bill, Of course ES is arbed, but not like, say, the emini currencies or SPY, where the arb trade is a very significant proportion of total volume. It's in those situations that I don't find MD to be helpful. For the trader not using MD, tracking the NYSE TICK can be quite useful...

Hi Bill, Thanks for mentioning my blog post. Before I say a few things about Market Delta, let me make clear that I am not affiliated with the firm, don't receive any commercial compensation from them, and my posts have not been solicited by them. I first turned to Market Delta shortly...

Hi Spydertrader, I'm very sorry if my post came across as a criticism of Jack. I was responding to Jem's point re: making skills routine and questioning the role of psychological methods in developing expertise. I am not at all familiar with Jack's work and would not presume to know...

Very. very insightful, Jem. You said it better than I could. Expertise results from a developmental process that tackles progressively difficult challenges and makes them routine. As a psychologist and a trader, I have profound difficulty with the view that "90% of trading is mental". We...

Hi Market Surfer, It's a great question, and I suspect the answer has a lot to do with the nature of the casino activity: how much skill vs. luck is involved. Poker is perhaps the closest gambling activity to trading. There, you have a combination of the objective and the subjective: the...

Hi Jack, Great suggestion re: studying the "games" played on the DOM screen. There are patterns worth noting for high frequency traders, but that trade has gotten increasingly challenging due to the way the computers (trading their algorithms) enter orders. One clarification. I conducted...

Excellent point, VSTscalper. A great deal of the orders you see in the book never actually becomes transacted as actual volume. That pulling of bids and offers from the book makes it difficult to rely solely on a DOM display for trade ideas. It's what actually transacts--and where those...

Hi Abel, The specific studies I've made have simply looked at every single trade in the ES futures market in a given day and how these are distributed with respect to their size. What we find is that large trades (certainly those of 50 contracts or more) represent a small percentage of total...

Hi, Thanks for the kind words about the blog, James. Reading every post, however, wouldn't leave much time for a long holiday weekend! :-) My April 1st post on the TraderFeed site contains many of my "how-to" trading posts. Some are particularly relevant to this thread, such as the...

Hi, Since I wrote the initial article, maybe I can contribute a bit of perspective while still maintaining the proprietary information and strategies employed by the very short-term traders I've worked with. Volume is key. That includes shifts of volume in DOM for some traders, but also...

Hello Joab, I apologize for any confusion in my blog. I'm not attempting to give "technical analysis advice", as I don't follow chart patterns, oscillators, etc. What I'm trying to do is identify patterns in the markets from the past several years. I factor these into my short-term...

Hi Hangingman, I agree; Brian Shannon does a great job with the video through his Alpha Trends site. My leaning would be to use video more for instructional/training purposes to show how setups emerge in real time; how to set profit targets/stops; etc. A lot of the mechanics of trading can...

Hello ETs, I appreciate the feedback and interest. I started the TraderFeed blog just about a year ago. At the time, I wanted to see if there would be interest in a service that had nothing to sell and nothing to hype. I tried to post ideas, not simply opinions, and tried to ground those...