this is only to prove tape reading works gann way.
Yesterday was probably the third day I have brought up the DOM and Tape for the mini Nikkei. Some observations:
Not as easy to lean on prices as the US markets ie a lot of flip flop. Will need to adjust to.
Sweeps... sometimes four to five ticks which means could be a fairly manipulated market. Something can possibly learn to take advantage of.
A lot of volume opened up yesterday and then liquidity increased dramatically at the mornings lows. Was a large CD difference, 15000 more contracts shorted in the first hour. This balanced out within 2 hours as price action retraced back up to the highs. So what I thought was institutional selling likely speculative... a lot of spec volume.
When grinding up and down, about 2-3000 absorbed at prices at minor retraces. But need to get some stats on this + much more time monitoring.
Have requests some tick data to look into volume flows more closely since my cqg doesn't provide any historical.
Just observations.
Does this market have about the same thickness and activity as ES?
I will hopefully also save you thousands and years by saying that the Nikkei contract is the one with some of the highest hft involvement among all other global futures contracts. TSE/Osaka is a hft play ground because of its technology stack and because there were numerous loopholes that are being closed one after another. I claim it will be impossible to make money trading those with a very short term approach. I would rather look into Nikkei options, much more inefficiencies there though the listed market is not liquid at all.
I appreciate the input. As mentioned in first post - am aware that is is heavily algo'd. I know guys that have their orders automated + collocated for this reason.
I am not trying to compete with the HFTs.. they can have the inside spread. All i am trying to read here is liquidity / flow / orders using automated tape reading and DOM for now. I don't really have an opinion on HFTs. I think their agenda is different to mine and that I would not even begin to be able to understand their overall strategy for making $$. If the principals of order flow stand, then hopefully I can at least make a few ticks consistently in this market. If so - there is plenty of liquidity (by the HFTs) to up the anti.
Where there could be a problem is if I do struggle to get fills - will have to hit / lift which could get expensive.
On a different note: Osaka Exchange reports quite clearly on all open interest and market maker activity which is neat. Is not really relevant to my trading but I could form a bigger picture bias based on this info.
http://www.jpx.co.jp/english/markets/derivatives/index.html
Of interest: Trading Volume by Trading Participant. Open interest by trading participant.
List of market makers: http://www.jpx.co.jp/english/deriva...ker/tvdivq0000003l9t-att/b5b4pj0000015gia.pdf