[Nick1984]

One other note on market internals is that while I believe they can give off their own signals and should 100% be used as confirmations they shouldn't become a crutch for you to trade off. After all the TICK etc is just a visual confirmation of things that your intuition and research should be telling you.

Many markets you may trade won't have all these internal tools to use so don't ever let them become a crutch.

In my studies at university Economics was a major for me so I am really into studying many of the fundamental changes to an economy which can in turn effects markets. Some traders expect on a Fed day the classic "1,2,3" move but they don't always understand the reason the markets move in any particular direction on the basis of key economic news. If you can interpret these types of news accurately then that helps you get in front of a large majority of traders so I would definately reocmmend you study books which talk about basic supply and demand macro economics.