Quote from They:
Actually, it is you who are missing the point. By using volume bars you are already translating price action into a foreign language. It might not be chinese but it is at least greek.
Bars/candles of any type are not price action in its "purest most perfect form". This is a fundamental mistake of many traders. They see the pretty charts and think this is how price action happens. In reality price does not move horizontally across your monitor the way you have artificially forced it to with your beloved volume bar/candle.
Price moves up and down vertically!
Volume and time are distributed horizontally. In other words, if you have any horizontally placed bars on your charts you are reading chinese or greek and already complicating things let alone if you are adding a price derivative based static oscillator as most people do. (cci, ergotic, MA based bla bla bla)
Just curios, if you were trading the ES would you keep your volume bars statically set to 1000 contract segments regardless of if the day's volume was 1.1 million contracts or 500K contracts? Would you adjust your volume bars for different contracts? Stocks? Whats your favorite volume bar setting? Is it a secret?
They
They, I am confused . . . nothing new. Explain to me how you would "Read" the price action of the Market if you do not lay it out in a bar or line chart? Please be specific here. I am self taught and am used to reading price action from a chart. I know you can "See" price action within a typical trading program but all you are seeing is the "Change" in price not the overall movement . . . from point A to point B.
To me, putting price into a volume chart is perfection, the same way you put a movie reel into a projector to see the uninterrupted feature, instead of one frame at a time. And yes, you have to statically set the volume chart to a personally readable amount of bars. I use 2401 contract bars for my interday trading chart and 16807 for my long term position trading chart. And no, it makes no difference whether 2M contracts are traded during the day or 10K. And you include the overmight data as well. Is today not a continuation of the trend established yesterday? Time has no relevance when you are "Reading" any Market price action simply from the standpoint of "Where the Price is coming from and where it is going" and each bar is a mirror image of the previous bar in size and creation. The only difference is the price range created by each bar which is created by the overall price action. The varying range movement is the readability of the chart.
Finally you add an (ONE AND ONLY ONE) oscillator to ONLY confirm the Support and Resistance tops & Bottoms. Yes I said confirm. An oscillator is imperfect and not to be trusted. Price is perfect . . . oscillators are not.
You have to adjust the volume bars for each individual Market or stock traded. I base each setting on contacts or shares traded per day. Whatever the amount you choose it makes no difference as long as once it's set it stays the same. My favorite foundation formula is derived from cycles; 3, 7 & 28. After 8 years of research those work out to be the clearest to see and that is important . . . to "SEE" price action.
And hanging man for S&P and Indu. Here's the yahoo version below which looks a little different. 