Quote from Mononoke:
Thanks that was very informative. I was thinking how to use volume more and realized that the most fundamental indicator for price has to be supply & demand ratio, there is also no lag involved here. So even if the type of font desk transactions don't take place this is still a good indicator. IMHO
As was pointed out to you by others, not everything is seen as the market operates. What is seen is sufficient and provides certainty for trading.
I do not have the "either/or viewpoint assigned to me. Certainly, I have made it my business to model and fully develop the markets and tools needed to operate in advance of market moves. See page 199 of Larry Harris where you will find the hierarchy of trading. I am a frontrunning technical parasite which means I speculate by "reading" the markets and I anticipate.
To deal with your opportunity, you need to be able to observe, analyze, decide and act.
I observe on three levels of precision: coarse, medium and fine. From this, I continually take the market's offer.
To carve the turns to collect profit segments as they flow, observing the DOM; a leading and lagging OTR (P and V);The T&S of the DOM and the bias and drift of the Premium is all that is required.
You will find the market is largely counterintuitive and it is controlled by the minority. Therefore, the first job incumbent on the pragmatic trader is to, at all times, know just who is the minority.
A second and important thing to follow and use to your advantage is the type of market harmonic that is at play, odd or even.
Of lesser importance but very significant is who and how the major three games that are played on the book level II. Most of what shows is there to handle adroitly the psychological and strategic shortcomings of the mediocre traders who misinterpret the "adding" and "pulling" of orders on and near the BBid BAsk.
RiskArb. com is a standard industry source of the Premium.
For a person just entering the world of using information to front run the markets and extract all of the offer segment by segment, the place to earestly consider is the orders that do not get filled as a market turn takes place. This is a specific observation of how the majority gets left behind and how the minority is in control.
A simple and very successful strategy is to do profit segments by taking the price move between these two limits as the sequence of limits is displayed one after another throughout the day.
Each limit comes into view five ticks before the limit acts to precipitate the turn. Therefore, this crude and coarse measure as a signal comes first.
Second you turn to the OTR's where one leads and one lags. You trade the lagger and use the lead to see the turn in advance as the crude limit, above cited, is being reached.
For a given harmonic, you can set the spacing of your partial fills as your orders carve the turn. An odd harmonic example is the FOMC news and its three moves followed by the asymptotic reversion under one of three conditions of damping. Before eminis, it was possible to pull 900 points on the DJX.X over a period of an hour or so on the FOMC announcement.
big money has a lot of mass in terms of a physics type consideration. As was pointed out to you these people are more MM's and money managers, so they do not "perform" but just strive for continuing commissions and fees and keeping clients satisfied. All these things add up to what you think is the standard for supply and demand. this is actually a low allowable level of "churning" that keeps the rent paid rasther than using capital to make money.
Keeping track of the "sentiment" of big money is easy to do. The sentiment shifts 20 to 40 times a day and closely resembles what you would experct to see where you to monitor RTM operations. Any imbalance would be corrected. Thus you see the limits of imbalance well in advance. The technical measure is done by using the Premium. Its first and second derivatives act as very reliable leading indicators of the traded price. Unfortunately the Premium is infrequency tabulated so algos and bots take on that job. Since they do and since they are crudely adjusted to trigger. Frontrunning, their triggers is just a matter of keeping a good monitor of "drift" in the picture.
finally, you need to look at the relationship of supply and demand as compared to "liquidity". As you do you discover HFT. This is just one of the many examples of how the members of the financial industry deal with finding ways to "use" financial markets to "get" something out of it.
In the long run, people who want to "take" the market's offer, concentrate on timing the segments of either of the two sentiments of big money's expression if sentiment.
Larry Harris spent a lot of effort towards defining this sweet spot. Being parasitic and adding frontrunning and doing it technically is the most attractive place. Obviously, it cannot be done inductively or based upon statistics; that is what the huge herd does. So a deductive paradigm emerges and noise and anomalies are eliminated. From that logic is used to assure certainty by sufficiency.
There are others who do not agree with me and still others who more or less pass on my comments because of the personal demands incurred. My viewpoint is that trading is not competitive but instead it is a very coherent process and is kindred to the coherence aspects of meditation: awareness, love and compassion, and wisdom. Trading is mindfulness.