So why are VWAP indicators pre-packaged in charting solutions a farce? And why should we condemn they who peddle them?
First charting companies lease rights to a limited portion of historical and real-time data from exchanges at a nominal percentage of the cost of the charting solutions' business. Straight forward, but none of the data from the exchanges being leased is published for a specific purpose, like at the book trades, VWAP, Quant algorithms, option strategies &c. The data is raw. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself obviously but what's needed to time institutional VWAP trades accurately are a) a feed to a data vendor who publishes VWAP calculations, b) the data vendor then must have a reliable database large enough to house n feeds to x exchanges, and c) the data vendor has to have exclusive knowledge to know which trades from y exchange are or are not being factored into VWAP at any given nano-second, at any given exchange and on xyz stocks within the exchanges. Needless to say there aren't many said data vendors extant, and were your charting solution provider leasing data from such a vendor, you certainly would know it looking at your bottom line.
What is it exactly charting companies are passing off as VWAP? A weighted moving average of volume mostly and if you're lucky maybe Level 1.5 trades weighted, but off the book trades aren't calculated - for no other reason than retail brokers and traders, specialists, market makers and institutional traders can't manipulate the calculation in numerous VWAP spread trades.
So I ask you: in your opinions, do we traders have a legal case against charting companies if you can prove that you lost money on what you were under the asumption were precisely timed excecution signals from a conglomerate of mass-automated VWAP trades, when in fact, said companies falsely represented having met the requirements to offer VWAP published data?
First charting companies lease rights to a limited portion of historical and real-time data from exchanges at a nominal percentage of the cost of the charting solutions' business. Straight forward, but none of the data from the exchanges being leased is published for a specific purpose, like at the book trades, VWAP, Quant algorithms, option strategies &c. The data is raw. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself obviously but what's needed to time institutional VWAP trades accurately are a) a feed to a data vendor who publishes VWAP calculations, b) the data vendor then must have a reliable database large enough to house n feeds to x exchanges, and c) the data vendor has to have exclusive knowledge to know which trades from y exchange are or are not being factored into VWAP at any given nano-second, at any given exchange and on xyz stocks within the exchanges. Needless to say there aren't many said data vendors extant, and were your charting solution provider leasing data from such a vendor, you certainly would know it looking at your bottom line.
What is it exactly charting companies are passing off as VWAP? A weighted moving average of volume mostly and if you're lucky maybe Level 1.5 trades weighted, but off the book trades aren't calculated - for no other reason than retail brokers and traders, specialists, market makers and institutional traders can't manipulate the calculation in numerous VWAP spread trades.
So I ask you: in your opinions, do we traders have a legal case against charting companies if you can prove that you lost money on what you were under the asumption were precisely timed excecution signals from a conglomerate of mass-automated VWAP trades, when in fact, said companies falsely represented having met the requirements to offer VWAP published data?