Quote from MAESTRO:
SENTIMENT READING AND INTUITION AMPLIFICATION
Sentiment is a state of mind of an individual or a group of people that is a result of their perceptions, feelings and emotions. It directly influences our attitude toward something and promotes our opinions, actions and intents. Sentiment is responsible for the formation of our BIAS and it also underpins our Decision Making process. Sentiment manifests itself through the optimism or pessimism in financial markets, politics and our social lives. An ability to quantify, assess or measure sentiment enables us to anticipate or even predict future actions and intent thus helping us to make decisions and guide our own actions accordingly.
There have been many attempts to quantify the sentiment of traders. A ratio between the open interests of Puts and Calls is just one example of using quantitative data to measure tradersâ sentiment. Another is the âCommitments of Tradersâ report issued by the CFTC (Commodities Trading Commission) which shows a breakdown of each Tuesdayâs open interest in markets where at least 20 traders hold open positions equal to or above the commissionâs specific reporting levels it has established. Of course creating a unit to objectively measure the sentiment and building the sentiment measuring scale are not easy tasks. As many subjects studied in Mathematical Psychology, sentiment is a multidimensional phenomenon that is extremely difficult to model. However, if we narrow down the scope of actions that we are trying to anticipate it creates the opportunity of quantifying the sentiment through those actions. This approach allows us to build indirect measurement scales to quantify the sentiment through the use of measuring units related only to those chosen actions. For example, if we only focus on buying and selling activities of traders their sentiment could be described as âbullishâ or âbearishâ thus creating the opportunity of quantifying it through the intensity of those actions. Overall, measuring the dynamics of the Order Book has been my approach to quantify tradersâ sentiment. In turn, a quantified level of registered âBullishâ or âBearishâ sentiment is one of the most powerful tools for developing a reliable anticipation of upcoming price moves.