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It is my guess that traders from your office don't really trade the heavy-volume instruments, whether in stocks or futures. It is my opinion that if you trade an index futures market such as the ES like many of us do, you would need a little more than a T&S and a simple chart. In this market, we have a multitudes of program tradings, arbitrage activities, and automated black box systems that would automatically read the T%S data and execute at blinding speed.
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Most of us trade heavy volume instruments - ES, T-Bonds, Bund, Eurostoxx, etc.
I'm sure there are complex automated systems out there, but they are the minority. Most automated systems are a) working order ques b) working pre-defined spreads c) arbing. Quite of a few us use auto-trading spreaders. Pretty simple stuff.
Things do happen at blinding speed, but you can still anticipate.
Think of the
DAX / ESTX50 automated trading. Last I heard it was something like a 2 millisecond lag between a tick in ESTX50 to a 2 tick move in the
DAX.
You can't take advantage of that - but you can still watch the depth in EXTX50 and see HOW it it starting to rally / fall. Is it likely to KEEP upticking, or did it uptick on a 5 lot? Did we just take out 150 offer, to run into 2,500 offered? Are we likely to get through that? What is the Bund doing? How about the ES? The Euro? How MUCH did the
DAX react? Over enough to start a short? How many people do you think just got long - is there a squeeze opportunity?
The problem with the ES is that it is filled with NON directional players now, who are fading every move as they spread it off to something else.
(In my opinion, I don't get why so many private traders are attracted to the ES. Big traders like it because they can squeeze a point on an insanely large trade. But if we don't care about huge liquidity, the volatility isn't actually that good.)
Everyone still has pressure points, and spreaders get ripped bigger than anyone else. You just have to understand your market, and how the traders within it operate.
In my opinion, you can "scalp" off the price depth all day, but the BETTER trades are to sit there and understand what is going on today, to understand how to trade a news event later the day or week.