NO BS Day Trading (order flow course) - Worthwhile or worthless?

Interesting comments. Just to be clear though.

I'm not expecting a broker statement from this educator and have reasonable expectations. As long as I can pick up some basics and new insights to build on, I'm more than happy. From some reading on the internet I get the impression that this guy is trading and trades real money, but it might well be he's not making substantial money. One guy commented that he had a losing week. So, he seems genuine.

My main concern is if there is any value at all from learning to 'read the DOM' and order flow. I'm not interested in becoming a scalper, but it's always nice to improve entries and exits.
 
Howard said:
Interesting comments. Just to be clear though.

I'm not expecting a broker statement from this educator and have reasonable expectations. As long as I can pick up some basics and new insights to build on, I'm more than happy. From some reading on the internet I get the impression that this guy is trading and trades real money, but it might well be he's not making substantial money. One guy commented that he had a losing week. So, he seems genuine.

My main concern is if there is any value at all from learning to 'read the DOM' and order flow. I'm not interested in becoming a scalper, but it's always nice to improve entries and exits.
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well. It's good to try using it.
You will learn something.

Occassionally I play around the order flow during boring trading days;
enter some bid order with no intention to buy, then remove it,
enter some offer order with no intention to sell, then remove it.
 
CALLumbus said:
But it has to be like this. Thats how a market works... you need a crowd (> 95%) that is losing money to fuel the huge profits of the winning minority.
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You often post real insights (IMO), CALLumbus, but this one was a bit of a miss. :wtf: [And in re-reading your post in context, you were making a much-more-broad statement {and one that I would agree with...}. Still,...]

In a DOM-related thread, it's fair to think about (just) BID-ASK spreads. So, if there is $1 difference between BID and ASK, and I offer to sell at 95¢ above the BID and get hit, and then seek to BUY out at 6¢ above the BID, and are also hit, who lost money? ((Ansr: nobody that matters.))

The buyer who bought at 5¢ below the current ASK is 5¢ ahead, and the seller who sold at 6¢ above the current BID is similarly 6¢ ahead. Absent commissions, the trader in the middle puts 89¢ in their pocket. :D

In scalping the BID-ASK spread, we are liquidity suppliers -- we are paid according to how much risk we accept to get paid -- the closer to the MID, the more likely we get hit, and the less piece out of the middle we get to pocket. o_O

The idea that anybody is "losing money" misplaces responsibilities of the market and traders. Scalpers -- time and money arbitragers -- get paid for their services, they don't steal or cheat anybody.:thumbsup:
 
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tommcginnis said:
You often post real insights (IMO), CALLumbus, but this one was a bit of a miss. :wtf: [And in re-reading your post in context, you were making a much-more-broad statement {and one that I would agree with...}. Still,...]

In a DOM-related thread, it's fair to think about (just) BID-ASK spreads. So, if there is $1 difference between BID and ASK, and I offer to sell at 95¢ above the BID and get hit, and then seek to BUY out at 6¢ above the BID, and are also hit, who lost money? ((Ansr: nobody that matters.))

The buyer who bought at 5¢ below the current ASK is 5¢ ahead, and the seller who sold at 6¢ above the current BID is similarly 6¢ ahead. Absent commissions, the trader in the middle puts 89¢ in their pocket. :D

In scalping the BID-ASK spread, we are liquidity suppliers -- we are paid according to how much risk we accept to get paid -- the closer to the MID, the more likely we get hit, and the less piece out of the middle we get to pocket. o_O

The idea that anybody is "losing money" misplaces responsibilities of the market and traders. Scalpers -- time and money arbitragers -- get paid for their services, they don't steal or cheat anybody.:thumbsup:
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Futures are a zero-sum market. Nothing is created out of nowhere. What you win must come from somewhere. And in the financial markets in general, there is a shift, a transfer in wealth going on all the time. I did not call it stealing. But it is a huge, global game. And in such a game, there are not many winners. There are very few who win big consistenly over a long period of time. That money, the gains of the few, they come, among others, from the many who are losing. Thats a general principle in life, it is a law of nature (Gaussian/ normal distribution): the top of the mountain can never be a crowded place.
 
There's a quote in his basic course that always stood out to me: "I cannot guarantee that you are going to make money trading, but if you read this book and pay attention to what I'm saying and start trying to anticipate what the big money is going to do, you will have a really good shot."

I think some people misunderstand, and think he is selling a system. If that was his intention then I think he did a really poor job. There's just not enough information in that book to read the setups, and then go out and start being profitable. All he does is teach order flow as it occurs in treasuries. Nowhere else have I seen as clear a description of how the games in the level 2 work. It gives you enough to understand what you are looking at, and then try to build your own trading plan from there. For that alone I think his course is a must read. It's something you can read over and over again to gain insight, even if you don't end up scalping.

But you got to understand that there's more to it than that. A lot of discretionary traders might not even be able to explain how they do it. There have been times when I saw a wall of orders and they bounced right off it. There have been times that I watched it slowly creep up as all the offers jumped out of the way. As others have already said I've seen it go up on negative delta, and down on positive delta. You'll notice that some of his signals are mirror images of each other. One is when the liquidity holds, and one is where the market orders goes through it. The big players have a lot of ways they can play it, and they'll go with the way that gives them the best chance of success. How do you know ahead of time what they are going to do? Sometimes if not most of the time there's just no way to know until it has already happened.

That is not to say that there is no edge in order flow reading. You can look at the jigsaw leaderboards if you want proof that people do make money from it. I'm just saying that the course alone won't get you there. Most are still going to end up in that 90% that lose. The course just gives you a fighting chance.
 
Order flow is definitely more than just the DOM, bid/ask volume footprint & whatever indicators coming from those good looking blocks. I've seen those nice selling uTube videos & none of them really touch the true stuffs behind the scene. Maybe they don't know or maybe I don't know whether they know. Even the VPIN studies were discussed in the wrong direction so who know what's the intentions are.
Someone around here said one time that the resting orders are important to order flow. I may add passive orders & aggressive orders also affect the book. DOM can only give you a snap shot but not a whole picture of buy/sell pressure from that you can get those precise entries. Precise but not fool proof.
Should you buy those order flow marketing software?
Ask yourself if you know the stuffs so good that you can make at least 5K-10K a day, would you sell your stuffs to the public and having all the problems w/ nasty customers? I wouldn't. I'd rather done trading within 2 hours and take my family to Disneyland or whatever fun for the children every day.

PS: You can't tell the intention of the big blocks whether they are pressed to sell or they are pressed to fill below unless you have a whole map of market depths to see how they release or press even more.
 
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