Any ideas on how to tell if it's going to be aq light day?

[cashonly]

Quote from steve46:

Most of the folks who I learned from monitor the Asian (Hang Seng) and European (DAX & Stoxx) markets prior to the US open.

In general way, this provides a context for the US open.

Yes, I definitely pay attention to the overseas markets as an important pre-market indicator for this. It seems to me that the more volatile they are, the more active the US markets.

Another piece of the puzzle is the pre-market indication which you could get IF you subscribed to the exchange imbalance report.

I'm not familiar with a pre-market exchange imbalance report... can you give me a link to a reference of that?

While with pre-market indications is something I look at on a stock specific basis, your comment has me thinking to look at them in the aggregate... perhaps to see what kind of correlation to volume there is based on the number of SP500 stocks with pre-market indications. However, I think this would be more of a volatility thing than a volume thing.

Since markets are mostly imbalance driven these days, the final clue is might be the Prem, or data from Market Profile.

I am sure you folks know this, but simply forgot to mention it in your previous comments.

Cash you trade with Bright so surely they taught you that a long, long time ago, right?

Steve

I definitely use the PREM as that's a primary factor (learned from Bright in the first few days I joined). What is the "Market Profile"? Is that a specific indicator?

Cash

 

[Arbitrageur]

Market Profile is the study of volume and time at price. The idea being, if you can see how much volume/time the market spent at different price levels, you can better determine how the market values those different price levels.

If a particular area of pricing has none, or very little volume while prices higher and lower have significant volume then you can safely see whee you are likely to find more buyers or sellers.

There is a tome of info on the CBOT site about MP available for free.