Predictor

I'm finished for today but this 1404-1406 region is a region where a reversal is more likely to develop...

Nice work if you can get it.... now that's much nicer.. Just got filled off the 1404.25. -- I don't trade on news. I only use it for reports. Not many futures traders trade on news but rather global economic conditions.

Looks like today could turn into a trend day to upside.. if so then 1404 is surely in play.. marketwatch+bloomberg

Looks like 90 is in play.. Christmas is too long.

I'm DFD (done for day). Somewhat an unusual day pattern imho... I *might* be tempted to rebuy a 90 retest but a lot of uncertainty and news driven today.

Exited for small profit... sellers seem aggressive here. First short of today.. short for a scalp.

Long market.... here dow turns green bid steps up. My models suggest market could re-test 1405 today.

Order flow has been mostly one sided and to the sell side since the 95 but no fill yet. Market continues to weaken makes me wonder if 92.50 will be good by the time it gets there..

At this point, I am thinking if we manage to go green on day then that will trigger a lot of buy bots. We're now within reach of that.. must step back and evaluate. Action been extremely fast so far. Exited remaining positions off the 95... on negative order flow. I will attempt a re-entry long side. Re-bid at the 92.50.

Was unable to get filled at 89.75... decided to go to market at 90.25 with 92 target. Nice.. So what happened there was I put my order above the high volume of limit orders in the book at 89.50 but a robot stepped in at 89.75 and took all the orders with a replenishing bid. Each time market came down, I wasn't able to get filled. There was responsive selling from the 90.25 and an order book imbalance, as soon as the buying pushed through that orderbook imbalance I shot in a market order.

Feel 90.25 being taken out was constructive... will attempt new long above at 88.50. Sellers did response at the 90.25 level.

Neg, what I was referring to was extreme selling that wasn't able to drive the price.. not an easing up. The volume really built there as limit order buyer stepped in.. of course in this case the report became the driving influence. Many TA claim that high volume is what drives price.. in most cases high volume is a sign of a limit order trader exhausting demand -- but not always.. that's what makes it difficult, of course. We're in another such place right now.. sellers have staked the 86 out... responding here but buyers look like they could push through. It could make sense for us to trade back to the 90 level today as larger participants wait for the 2 PM report to stake large positions. What do others think about this 2PM report?

My own feeling is that these home sales aren't that important one way or another.. its a small difference. We also have the 2 PM report today too.

Neg, where are you getting that info? MarketWatch is reporting it as negative but bloomberg reports the number as inline with expectations. I think the prior revised is the reason the market reacted negatively.. prior was revised lower

It looks like a test of 90.25 is in play... sellers were unable to drive the market to new low. Often the market seems attracted to the largest quantity of resting limit orders. Housing report due here, as well.

There is buying at the current lows.. as long as 87.50 holds my bias is long here (tentative). Sellers in book have pulled back to 92. Trying to get a feel here... For long side, taking out 90.25 would be productive. Sellers have pulled in to this level. Sellers being exhausted at 87.50 is a good example of what I was referring too. We had huge sell orders going off there but the order book imbalance and limit order demand exhausted sell orders. We subsequently developed an order flow reversal from this book imbalance.

While, we've pretty much frozen new features at this stage, I was able to sneak in a new feature last night. This new style shades the Volume Accumulator/Inventory Tracking with the average intensity of the selling or buying based on all values in the accumulator. In other words, we add up all the differences for each cell and divide by the total. This shows us whether there was overall more buying or selling since we started tracking. This is also analogous to a "Power Bar". I believe this style will prove very useful. The entire column changes color as the net selling and buying changes.

Sounds interesting. I found that there was a learning curve to go from "planned trading" to "real-time" trading. The skills required for "real-time" trading are rather specialized and many don't understand this difference. I wanted to add that options (options on futures) are a possibility for those who desire to swing trade with perhaps less capital and/or limited risk. I have seen what looks like some potential in these instruments but haven't much experience with them, yet.

My approach to order flow is what I call "theory free" in that I'm looking for patterns but I don't hold conviction as to how things should work. Many beginning tape readers think it is all about the market orders but over time I've been able to read (pick up) where the larger limit order traders will sit off market. What tends to happen is that when these limit order drivers are identified, momentum traders will drive price away from them (front run). But, the limit traders tend to be the biggest traders and so the price will usually go back to them (revert to value). This is, also, how they (the big boys) manipulate the market -- by pulling the bids or offers. This is a low risk way to manipulate the market. Whether these are emergent behaviors of a large number of participants or the result of a few large market participants is not really important, what is important is to learn to identify where the limit price drivers are sitting off market. One pattern that occurs quite often is after an extended move up or down, a selling or buying extreme will occur and will be unable to move price. The implication is clear: a constantly replenishing limit order bid/offer. This phenomena often leads to high volume areas where the price is prone to reverse. At any rate, with so many wrong sided market order traders, all that is required is to push the price a few ticks to trigger the stop run. Another similar pattern that occurs is an extremely rapid buying or selling "wrong sided" at these times. This is not human buying. In some cases it is likely stop runs. But, in other cases such activity is more difficult to make sense of. I suspect it may be manipulative bots (or high frequency equities bots) running into large speculators who sit using limit orders. Perhaps, these bots are attempting to trigger a stop run or move the market a few ticks or simply attempting an arbitrage. Perhaps, they identified liquidity and are reacting to it with more liquidity. Regardless, if they are unable to drive the price then that's a good sign the market will reverse. One of the experimental measures we have in the program is what we call SynchronousVolume. With this measure, we measure how one or two sided the order flow is.. what we've found is that when the "one sidedness" of the order flow passes a threshold that the price almost always follows through whereas when the order flow is two-sided then we have reversion. This one-sidedness appears to be the best indicator of what will drive price -- not just imbalance. In one respect, this measure is a "modern day" equivalent of being able to measure large size trades -- which are split up now. For order execution, if I feel a reversal is imminent then one technique that I use often is to shoot in a market order when the imbalance in the book has reached an extreme (light pink/blue) and the order flow has reversed to become dominant on the other side. It is quite often possible with this technique for the trade to become profitable without ever taking any heat. This works well in volatile times/markets.

ZDO, Not currently.. in the future we might add multiple accumulators though. We already have the ability to display the same accumulator in multiple forms. You can always clear it again though.

PrymeTyme I'll try to clear up any confusion. There could yet be bugs but this is probably just a misunderstanding. I will be running final testing later this week and will look closely for any wrong calculations. For the OrderFlow Bars we can display the orderflow in a few ways: total volume, difference volume (buys-sells), and bid vs ask (bids vs ask). We can shade the bars based on difference volume (or intensity of buying/selling) or based on total volume. I'm running the OrderFlow Bars in total volume with shading based on intensity of buying selling and running Accumulator column as bid vs ask. In my own trading, I track closely where high volume occurs regardless if it is selling or buying. I call the far right columns the Orderflow Monitor which accumulates the orders hitting the bid/ask but at any time we tick up or down then I overwrite the previous value --but I don't clear cells. We can render this in 3 ways: just accumulate, accumulate and show the pressure in the parenthesis, and finally PressureVolume -- just show the pressure. Hope that helps.

Neg, Thanks for the compliments. We took extreme measures to make it as responsive as possible. As a tape reader, I recognize the importance and have been testing and trading with it live for a long time now. We have achieved 100x Playback speeds without lag because we can control the data transfer fidelity, data processing, and graphics rendering independently. The program doesn't use a lot of memory because we only use the memory that is required - probably less then 20MB. Given that we can "throttle" everything independently then the program should run responsively over a fairly broad spectrum of hardware. Even so I would recommend an I7 generation or equivalent processor for best performance. Let me clarify, also, the program does not allow the placing of any trades. You would use NinjaTrader SuperDOM or you could use any broker supplied DOM for that. One of the main reasons we use NinjaTrader for the datafeed is that it gives the trader the ability to use any NinjaTrader supported datafeed such as Kinetic or IQFEED. I believe Kinetic, some say it is rebranded IQFEED, is about the cheapest professional feed available and it is only available for NinjaTrader. Of course, you could still use CME fee waivers if you have them. Also, the NinjaTrader platform is free, as well if you don't place trades through it. Likewise, when we bring out the MultiCharts edition then you will be able to use any MultiCharts feed including broker feeds. As for other platforms, there is no other software out there that does everything that I want. I researched all other software possible and only committed to building my own when I was satisfied the alternatives were inadequate. There is no other software out there showing order book imbalances or that uses my PressureVolume dash-price rendering style. Another important factor for me is that my software is designed to spin up and start processing live data -- no matter if the historical data is available or not. I find this ability to start analyzing the real-time data without a lot of setup very critical for me. We don't have a database so we don't have the types of problems that come with that nor does our software encourage the temptations that full-featured charting programs might. NinjaTrader feeds us the historical data and seems solid in that regard. As for the pricing, I think that using a "counting up features" approach would be misguided because I have a lot of trading software that does a lot more but doesn't do what I want for tape reading. The other side to the pricing is that I personally don't feel there are a lot of futures traders out there and thus not sure it would be worth the effort to offer it for much less. But, I believe there are at at least a small group of professionals and aspirational traders who will see the value and demand it. While the professionals would pay more, I believe it is affordable for those who aren't quite professional yet. It will cost less then many cell phone plans and internet plans. It also works with currency futures and should work with Forex. There might be a larger market in Forex (either trading the Forex from the futures or directly), and we might offer a specialized product for that market in the future. I'd like to try it with Forex but been too busy...

For those who don't watch videos, I thought I'd share a couple screen shots of my software: A breakdown of what you see: 1. Volume Histogram -> can be built to specs 2. Orderflow Bars -> Shows the volume and intensity of buying selling inside time/range/volume bars. 3. Visual Depth -> Renders depth as histogram. We highlight the markers which tracks the MODE of the bid and ask. I focus primarily on the yellow markers as they often lead the order flow. 4. OrderFlow Monitor -> This is my trademark PressureVolume display. I show the difference in the trades hitting the bid or ask for the dominate side only. On the other side, I print a dash. This allows me to see directional order flow. I've found as a tape reader that its not just imbalance in buying/selling but concentrated (one sided) trading over short burst is what drives the market. We highlight the bid/ask and color whichever is getting more orders yellow. 5. LimitResistance -> We track the resting limit orders and compute the imbalance. We can do this in a number of ways, i.e just add up all buys-sells or add up only some levels. We can also do mode-mode. I track the first few inside levels. Most orderflow reversals start with imbalances in the book. This column is easy to track because I'm just watching for a flashing light pink or light blue. This is a leading indicator of the order flow... Now just because this pattern precedes most orderflow reversals doesn't mean that most imbalances lead to orderflow reversals.

First, let me start of by thanking the admins here who have recognized the value of my contributions, and what I have to offer as a trader and a vendor, and have expressed an interest in my sharing more here. Over the past year, I've been both developing and trading with specialized software that I designed for reading the tape, order flow, and order book imbalances. We are now nearing completion of the software and have developed it to a commercially ready state. We are running some last minute tests and plan to have it available for subscription in the next 1-2 weeks. The pricing isn't finalized but it will be available for a monthly subscription fee (likely around $120-$160/month). The first version will be fed by the Ninjatrader platform and we are authorized Multicharts developers, as well. We plan to have a MultiCharts version ready in about 6-8 weeks. There is no way to purchase the software yet but if you sign up under the "Contact Us" tab on our website then you'll be added to our maillist and will get first notice. In this thread, in my first posts I plan to start by explaining how the software works and what it offers because it works differently then most other software. In later posts, I plan to share more of my own trades, calls, and trade setups in more detail. - Curtis http://orderflowdashpro.com

No idea about this product but this individual seems to be a rather serious professional. Blue, I take just the opposite view: I suspect that those traders/vendors who are doing their own research, developing on tools, etc are much more likely to be successful then the majority of traders who just go by what they've read online or in popular books. Of course, one has to learn to identify the marketeers from those who've put a lot of time in and work into their 'trade craft'. I've no relationship to this Chan individual, for the record.