I always thought that Futures markets have more sophisticated participants compared to equities. I guess that's not the case anymore as technology leveled the playing field.
You can go back 100 years using daily Wheat data, and same patterns exist whether on dailies, weeklies higher/lower timeframes, people are people, whether they trading million shares or the guy do a one lot in Live Cattle. I believe there are seven basic chart patterns for break outs or you can take a position on trendlines, or wait for failures. Risk for me is ideal on failures and trend line bounces, and cause risk is so low, can do 2-3 times more volume than the breakout trader's risk. But you study charting or indicator entries/exits long enough, there is always going to be gunning for the stops by HFTs and bigger traders as pushing the market few ticks to hit stops is easy money for them. It just easier to take other side of those who gunned the stops to let them out and trade back into direction of trend, perhaps HFTs/large traders do a reverse and smaller traders jump back in on second try.
The sophistication is the automation and depth of programming skills one has
PLUS years of ability to read charts, but I not read where many quants have those charting skills. I don't see new patterns ever forming as apps do not last but a few months based on math and science. Of course we never going to hear about those that last beyond a few months.
Trading is not what most think they have to accomplish, so many think more per contract is required to do well, and it is not. Consistency of netting something each day grows accounts.
@Handle123: of course you can create a strategy from this pattern but my initial question is still open: can some one calculate how many lots he needs to trade in a certain moment in order to move the market until a certain point. I´m always impressed that the market stops exactly on the last high or low.
This is impossible to know, HFTs can trigger market orders based on speed of the market going in one direction, angle of price on whatever timeframe, different timeframes produces different trendlines. Question you ask is like asking how many specs of dust in the desert each timeframe on windy day.
If you want to really be impressed, checked how many times previous H/L are broken but closes didn't close beyond previous H/Ls, this seems to happen more in ES as it is used much more as hedging instrument, but happens in other markets as well.