what some folks (old timers) still refer to as "tape reading".
I beg your pardon?

what some folks (old timers) still refer to as "tape reading".

I think he should just use Youtube...tons of videos of live trading sessions
Unfortunately, in today's market environment, the big concern now about tape reading is that it now involves algos.
And I think you can see that stuff at work, especdially in the ES DOM, but it is largely between ticks. These bots are scalping from bid to ask. IMO, the move from level to level is where the money is for the retail trader, and the bots don't seem to have much if any effect on price making those moves (though they influence the micro moves along the way).
I find this very difficult to communicate, game. I think the only way I could really do this justice would be to record a live screen and narrate it as it is happening, or record it and annotate after the fact.
...In a similar way, are there any obvious general principles with regard to order flow that you would be able to state? I understand that each principle will have its nuances.
http://www.youtube.com
Seriously, its all there with general explanations and very detailed explanations...some of it containing actual live trading recordings.
In contrast, if you're not interested in Youtube, there's been prior (very useful) discussions on this here at Elitetrader.com that you can find via the search menu...specific threads on the info you request.
Presumably backtesting is a part of this learning process. How else will you know if your trading plan is worth pursuing? Given that we're talking about futures, how do you go about constructing the continuous contract you need for backtesting?So I am interested in how people learn to trade index futures contracts and the systems they use. I do this myself pretty much every morning from 9AM to 11AM Eastern.
Somehow people have to learn and we all know that takes a long time. But how do we get to where we want to be?
There is a lot of free and commercial information. Most is useless but some is not. My task is to separate the two.
I'll try to post regularly and look forward to your comments.
There are a couple of really good ones out there, but this is ET, and they are vendors, so I won't mention them by name, ...... youtube would be as good a place as any for someone to start searching to put the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle together and cut through the bs to find what is no bs in day trading. [emphasis added]


Thank you. I will explore youtube and past ET postings on this matter. 40D's suggestions have been extremely helpful in the past, so it would behoove me to ask him as much as he would allow.