Quote from SoCalTrader619:
I've already read many of your old posts. One of my favorites was this-
"Water does run uphill .... just ask any windsurfer in shallow water or look at the rain hiting your windscreen when driving.
What is happening is an external force (windspeed) is sufficent to overwhelm gravity.
The markets are similar.
Dont give up on delta and volume, just learn to use it in it's proper context."
I would say that buy/sell pressure (size) moves the market. Size comes in by the "Big Boys" at important areas of Support and Resistance, which also happen to be the areas where AMT calculates net long/short inventory.
good morning SoCalTrader619,
I no longer use cum delta, I only watch price at s&r bands because price behavior is the net output of the contracts traded ... in other words, watch the price to trade the price.
I did not discard cum delta lightly as I felt it was telling me additional news, but that was because I was also following T&S.
One day, in order to make things clearer, I normalised cum delta and ran it against normalised price on a 0-100 scale.
That was my turning point and it opened the door of learning further as to the relationship between price and volume.
Cum delta includes all volume as you know, It absorbs MO's (market orders) and resting orders without distinction and yet only MO's move price.
Also, if you have ever run a 1 tic range chart against bid-ask volume, you will clearly see the effects of the assumption that "longs trade at the ask" can have.
The bulk of the contracts are traded via a small percentage of strikes, made even smaller when you consider that many of the strikes are multi split trades.
We don't know why people enter strikes, the reasons are varied and quite frankly we do not need to know ....we only know the net effect on price.
These people behind the big trades have more knowledge and firepower than we do, but their actions become obvious if you watch T&S and price for long enough.
Someone ran a thread about "what is your edge" a while ago and there was a great deal of spirited response.
Frankly, if we are not making constant profits in line with a good solid plan then eventually we will run our account dry.
And so constant profitability is our edge, and we achieve it only through risk management ... which rather makes the word "edge" slightly superfluous.
Back to cum delta.
It is my belief that it contains short comings and when watched, distracts a Trader from fully absorbing the net effect of volume upon price. Price needs to be read in it's context like music, not one bar at a time.
In other words, if price is the outcome of all types of acceptable entries, then focus solely upon price.
In favour of cum delta, I would add that it helped me more fully understand price behaviour which in my opinion holds the key to risk management.
I view it as a step in a journey.
regards
f9