Quote from ivob:
Thank you bi9foot.
I looked again at Spyder's drawing and understand it better now.
I highlighted the asymetry I think we should be looking for. I always looked with a littlebit coarser view at the tic chart which works fine but you lose a few more ticks.
This means theoretically we can enter just one tick away from the optimal entry..
regards,
Ivo
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Honestly, you are going to be disappointed. Losing ticks? What do you think is missing from your picture? There is NO SILVER BULLET TICK! For you esignal users, plot the newly range/tick bar plot for your enlightenment. Then plot on the same chart the bid and the ask and WATCH VERY CLOSELY. You will then have the range chart overlayed with the bid and the ask and you will see how the DOM moves ahead of the range chart. This too has noise but WHO CARES. At any level, who cares about the noise. If your ATM is working properly (ie. dispensing), you won't care even at the forest level unless you are driven to improve.
There is a confluence of things that just fit VERY snugly together. When we talk about anticipation, it is the realm in which your confirmation is the precursors to the event that will lift your trade. Why bracket before a fed announcement??? Because volume is going to push the price right out of the zone it is currently residing in...
So how many precursors do you get before a two pair??? What is the profile of volume before the 2 pair? What does STR/SQU look like? Where is P with respect to the channel? The YM? Flaws?
2 Pairs aren't any sort of solution to your trading. They are just a resolution. However, if you can't bank the opportunities at the channel resolution, the finer resolutions will not make much sense.
The idea is to know and be comfortable with what the picture looks like at each resolution. This is why I commented about how 2pairs look like on flags. When the DOM finally came around, it was immediately apparent to Jack what the two pair must look like on DOM with respect to liquidity (minority). I long for the day when some tool eventually shows us the full DOM queue on all 4 sides instead of just 2.
Is my trading handicapped for not having the capability? No! The point is, there will always be noise of some sort, however, the focus is to data-gather the important stuff and filter out the noise. It is near impossible to get a noiseless picture. Just work on understanding the picture. For this resolution, the details are, the dominant side of a bid/ask (ie. where are most of the trades firing at with respect to liquidity - bsize/asize), AND the DOMINANT PAIR (ie. 2pair). If you can piece together, the minority, liquidity, T&S, and 2pairs into a neat 4 piece picture that makes sense to you, you'll get the "aha" which is not to be confused with the "I think I get it" or the "Is this right spyder?". A long while ago, I got rid of the "I think I get it" because usually it means "I really don't get it". Instead I dwelled on "aha"s. If you THINK you get it, then you probably "DON'T" get it because when you DO get it, it makes perfect sense and you can easily recognize it on the chart because you know EXACTLY what the picture looks like even though you hadn't seen it before... In other words, you know exactly what it looks like and when you see it for the first time, it looks exactly like what you thought it would look like...
MAK