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TinGull you've answered your own question many times - your stop was too tight! Think of it as a cheap lesson in how to trade big up days and never forget it.

No one wants to be running executables on their trading PC. Why not just upload to filefront or youtube?

Slansky's 'The Theory of Poker' tells it best. You can calculate probability and odds playing poker much more precisely than you can trading. For each hand you hold you know (or can calculate) the exact probability of that hand winning. You can also calculate your exact odds on each bet you make because you know how much you stand to win if you have the best hand and how much money you need to bet to continue. Therefore if your probability of winning is higher than the odds you need to pay to continue then you should bet. Of course in reality there's the issue of bluffing and gamesmanship but these apply less to online poker.

Could you not just encode these movies in .avi format which everyone will be able to play with installing dodgy files on their trading computer?

The next one is coming up this week. It'll be interesting to see if the market reacts the same way.

There's an old strategy called the Big Ben strategy which involves trading the GBP/USD breakout on the London open. As far as I can see it doesn't seem to work very well as there are lots of fakeouts and whipsawing during this period.

It depends what currency pair. For those involving one or two European currencies then the London session is most volatile. As you're looking at USD/JPY I would say the overlap between London and New York is your best bet: 1300-1600 London time. Big economic releases out of Japan and the US create big volatility.

I think the 2 contracts are too different. YM is large cap, Russell is small cap. YM is ECBOT, Russell was Globex. I think the Russell will be traded on both Globex and ICE for a while so there'll be plenty of time for traders to make the transition. If anything I think Russell traders will be looking at other Globex futures to trade.

I see volatility the same as 2006 - volatile during consolidation but then a slow steady grind higher. It might appear more volatile because a 1% daily range of 13500 is 135 while a 1% daily range of 12000 is only 120.

It's more volatile than it's been for the past couple of months but less volatile than February/March. Just business as usual...

I don't think it's at all related. It's the underlying stocks that really move these markets and we're just seeing volatility as the massive up move consolidates. We're seeing the same thing in ES and NQ.

The tax issue you mention is specific to the US. I don't know how relevant it is to the OP (not at all relevant to me). There are other funding issues to consider. ETFs pay a dividend whereas if you were planning long term investments with futures you'd need a lot of money in your brokerage account (probably not receiving any interest) to cover the large drawdowns that you'd probably suffer.

Good point. If you're looking to invest you're far better off with an ETF like SPYDERS (same underlying as ES - S&P500), DIAMONDS (same underlying as YM - Dow) or QQQQ (same underlying as NQ - NASDAQ). The longest time frame for futures trading is the expiry of the contract which is only 3 months from start to finish. Anything more than that and ETFs are your thing.

There's a lot more volume on NQ than YM. If you multiply the tick value by the daily ATR the NQ is the cheapest of all mini US stock index futures to trade. It doesn't get debated much on this forum (until now) but does on other forums.

Definitely the bullish hammer and it's bearish mirror, the shooting star. They tell you a lot about market psychology. The price has been auctioning lower but gets sharply rejected at a certain level to close higher (for a perfect hammer) or lower (for a perfect shooting star). A doji represents indecision whereas a hammer/shooting star represents a more decisive reversal.

There are already at least 2 threads on this issue.

ICE handle the most widely traded energy contract (Brent Crude) and have pioneered the all-electronic platform so I'm sure they can handle ER2 smoothly. It only costs £1 to subscribe to ICE data on IB - I don't know about other brokers and data providers.

Have a great holiday. It's always good to get away and come back refreshed and ready to rumble.

With Interactive Brokers you can subscribe to ICE data for just £1.

I prefer comparing volume bars to previous bars as far back as possible. Looking at today's 15 minute bars, for example, we can see that the reversal bar was higher than all of today's and Friday's volume bars except the first 15 minutes on Friday. If we look to today's 5 minute chart we see the reversal bar was higher than any today or on Friday. This all points to strong demand coming in on the lows of the day and potentially further strength ahead.

VSA makes a lot more sense without that 85% concept. The way I interpret Master the Markets the professional traders are a minority only active during accumulation/distribution and upthrusts/downthrusts. As you say, the important thing is to focus on the supply and demand dynamics as you've illustrated very well in the charts you've posted.

Trading syndicates definitely exist but they don't account for anywhere near 85% of volume. Investment funds, mutual funds and pension funds, on the other hand, definitely account for much more than 15% of volume. I agree totally with what's written by Tom Williams in Master the Markets. What has really confused me is the claim that 85% of volume comes from professional traders. That figure doesn't appear in Master the Markets. Where does this figure come from? I also agree that trading syndicates (as well as hedge funds, specialists and market makers) are secretive but how could they be secretive if they accounted for 85% of the volume? I agree with traderxman - it's not necessary to identify who does what. One can use VSA without worrying about what percentage of volume is "Professional Money" and who exactly this "Professional Money" is.

The Liquidity Data Bank goes into detail about that too. We can look at volume by price for the month of February. We can look at the price range 12747 to 12826. This price range is "the top" before the big 500 point fall. For commercial clearing members there were 167,765 buyers to 169,707 sellers. For the public there were 126,034 buyers and 123,895 sellers. So the commercial clearing members did marginally better than the public, but only by a tiny percentage. The full figures are in the image. We still don't have a definition of smart money or professional money - are they necessarily the same thing? What about dumb professional money? The only definitition that makes any sense is the circular argument that to buy at the bottom and sell at the top is smart, so smart money must have been doing it. If that's what smart money is then I agree with it. But the implication that some people are making is that there's a particular type of trader (undefined) buying at the bottom and selling at the top. My invitations to identify them (e.g. are they investment banks, locals, pension funds, central banks or what?) have been ignored.

Where does this mysterious 85% figure come from? We're expected to take this figure as an article of faith on the basis of what - some guy on the internet having a guess? There's no need to guess. The information is in the public domain. CBOT publishes it's Liquidity Data Bank which divides volume into locals (Cti1), commercial clearing members (Cti2), members filling orders through other members (Cti3) and members filling orders for the public (Cti4). In spite of me pressing the point no one in this thread has attempted to identify who "Professional Money" is. But let's assume that locals and commercial clearing members represent "Professional Money" and the public are not. Let's look at 27th February because that was a big day for YM. Total volume was 2,089,414. Breakdown by group was as follows: 362,997 (Cti1), 1,023,334 (Cti2), 6,421 (Cti3), 696,662 (Cti4). We can see from that that the public made up almost exactly a third of the volume, and only two thirds was due to "Professional Money". What is even more interesting is the breakdown between buy volume and sell volume. It's interesting because there was almost an identical number of buyers and sellers in each group. Looking at the locals (Cti1) there were 182,292 buyers and 180,705 sellers. For the commercial clearing members there were 507,547 buyers and 515,787 sellers. For the public (Cti4) there were 351,724 buyers and 344,938 sellers. So this idea of the "Professional Money" always being right and the public always being wrong is nonsense. There were winners and losers in every group. The market is a lot more complex than this "Professional Money" controls everything nonsense.

Here are a couple of charts showing how VSA is great with hindsight but not so great in real time trading. I don't think VSA is worthless on a 5 minute chart but I don't think you can point at high volume and say "that's Professional Money!". We really have no idea who or what is behind a volume spike from one 5 minute period to the next. The 5 minute charts are useful if you're looking for the perfect entry but you're getting your directional bias from the 15 minute charts. That's why I think multi timeframing is an important part of VSA. I don't think it's necessary to try and identify who is behind a volume spike. The important thing is to recognise that reversals occur on high volume around support and resistance areas.