Is watching Time and Sales useful at all?

[Buy1Sell2]

Staring at charts is ridiculously naive

FALSE

 

[marketsurfer]

FALSE

Prove it, anonymous one.

90% plus volume is done by algorithmic trading machines. Some are geneticly programmed thus are constantly changing.

Heck, one I am aware of is on its 10,000th itteration over the last week. It is inpossible for a human being to compete with this by staring at charts or T&S. Stop deluding yourselves.




This will be the end of the baseless unaccountable screaming ( capital letters) OR will turn into personal attacks as the technical religious fanatics pile on. Sad!

surf

 

[Buy1Sell2]

I do, here, all the time.

 

[wartrace]

I agree that order flow is useful (or at least the price and volume part of it), but not sure why it is necessary to track bid / ask traded volume or open orders. In that situation that you describe of 1480 orders hitting the bid and no follow through...what would price and volume be doing? You'd see lots of volume and price stopped at a level. What additional information does the bid / ask tell you? I've looked at 4 levels of the order book when watching futures (CL or ES). What I see is volume continually refreshed at both levels until it is instantly no longer refreshed and price moves. So I can see how volume and price can be predictive of price. But I have not found any advantage to looking at the order book or tracking whether trades execute on the bid or ask. For an HFT firm, there likely is an advantage, but the order book moves so fast, I suspect network latency would be a disqualifier for any algorithm that a retail trader could develop. Of course, if a retail trader has managed to find consistent profitability by applying such a strategy and is laughing at this post, that's awesome.

In the example you posted there was nothing traded below 1480. This tells me that a trader or traders were adding to the bid limit orders. You would have seen that if you used Jigsaw's DOM or other software that tracks the limits. They were actively absorbing the sell market orders. Does it always work for them? No. It is nothing but an area to watch. As the price moved away (up) from that area it would have been a signal to go long. You know that most of the 1480 contracts that hit the bid are now going to sell to close out their losing trade.

Here is a video of using Jigsaw to spot absorption.

You have to use the right tools. I use ninja trader as a platform but its DOM/T&S is useless to me. I am not trying to sell anyone on Jigsaw; all I can say is it works for me. Unlike a standard DOM Jigsaw shows how many contracts are added/pulled from the limit orders.

 

[lawrence-lugar]

Staring at it or at charts is ridiculously naive yet many are seduced

We all stare at charts -- that's what every person in finance does all day basically, more or less.
Charts,... along with a host of other considerations and factors and variables.

But the devil/skill is in the details or intuition -- looking at charts/trading is kind of like art...we all see and interpret it slightly differently,

The blind will look at charts like brain dead robots; while the more ...open-eyed...will see and sense things happening and unfolding constantly, ...

All of this is kind of highly dependent depending on if you're a day trader, swing trader, or longer-term investor.
It's kind of hard (or not applicable) to apply a wide, blanket statement to everything in the marketplace.

 

[userque]

I Trained Rats to Trade, and Win, on Wall Street
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/rattraders-0000519-v21n12

 

[bigsnack]

What do you consider a reliable market replay platform?

My business partner ended up having to code one for Ninjatrader, cause we didn't have access to anything we liked.

 

[ET180]

Prove it, anonymous one.

90% plus volume is done by algorithmic trading machines. Some are geneticly programmed thus are constantly changing.

Heck, one I am aware of is on its 10,000th itteration over the last week. It is inpossible for a human being to compete with this by staring at charts or T&S. Stop deluding yourselves.

This will be the end of the baseless unaccountable screaming ( capital letters) OR will turn into personal attacks as the technical religious fanatics pile on. Sad!

surf

Wow, so apparently there are no successful discretionary chart traders anymore. I did not know that! What a claim! Head and shoulders, double top, support and resistance...nah, that can't be caused by "absorption". Sounds like someone peddling his book!

 

[marketsurfer]

Wow, so apparently there are no successful discretionary chart traders anymore. I did not know that! What a claim! Head and shoulders, double top, support and resistance...nah, that can't be caused by "absorption". Sounds like someone peddling his book!

Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that this is the case. Not intraday, anyway.

surf

 

[ET180]

Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that this is the case. Not intraday, anyway.

surf

The longer term market participants don't establish positions based on order flow. Look at CL and ES and you'll see those machines respecting support and resistance levels, chart patterns, and trend lines all day long. To say that these patterns no longer matter requires you to make the claim that there are no profitable traders who trade based on these patterns. That's a pretty bold claim to make. I'd post a link to a trading journal on another forum, but I probably can't since that place competes with here. There is a trading journal by an individual "Gary" who trades CL intraday profitably for a living. It's about 487 pages long spanning several years and he only uses S/R, trendlines, and price action (basic trend - higher highs, lower lows). He's not the only guy who trades price action profitably for a living.