I am now, quite simply, amazed. I knew what I was for and was thinking that it wasn't truly original, but I had not been able to find it. Until now. Of course, it was already there, but I just didn't know what to look for.
In a previous post, I discussed the sequence of events I encountered in
realizing the power of the Market Profile, and that it
will yield good information about a symbol's meanderings. Market Profile is mostly about
price brackets over the course of a period of time, which is typicall a day's
duration broken down into 30 minute intervals.
But knowing that volume has much to do with interpreting market activity, I knew that
Market Profile needed that 'something extra'.
Market Delta takes the Market
Profile concepts, adds volume information at the bid/ask/trade perspective, and provides
versatile and flexible mechanisms for viewing the data in any volume related market (which
excludes straight forex, but includes forex futures). Market Delta demonstrates
dramatically the concepts that I knew to be possible.
Market Delta's web site has excellent training and tutorial materials. There are video
presentations as well.
Market Delta works with feeds from Interactive Brokers and IQFeed, as well as
others. One of the others is a broker called CQG, one that I have not heard of before,
and gets a variety of reviews at www.elitetrader.
In an article called Market Profile: A Best Practice in Trading, Brett Steenbarger makes a
good point that is
useful in overall trading that I like to keep in mind: "be aware of value areas at one
level larger than the timeframe being traded". In an Amazon review of the "Markets in
Profile" book, he further enhances this by quoting from the book: "If you can correctly
identify which timeframe is in control of market activity, and you have a good understanding
of how the individual timeframes generally behave, then you are in a stronger position to
trade, invest, and effectively control risk." I'd like to add that the same holds true for
keeping track of what occured in previous time frames. Points of Control (POC), which are
price points at which highest volume occurred, are good sources of support and resistance,
and are an example of points of information available from previous and larger time frames.
He also makes reference to a site called WINdoTRADEr. The page to which I have linked has some interesting screen
captures of the market profile in action and how previous time frames relate to following
time frames.
As a side note, in a previous message, I introduced 'proprietary trading firms'. Brett
says "the best strategy for finding solid proprietary trading firms is to go to the futures
exchanges themselves and obtain a list of their clearing members. You'll find major prop
firms within such a list. The CME education dept maintains a list; they're quite helpful--".
As another side note, of marginal interest, to make something painfully obvious, some
traders build bars from ticks, rather time. And in building tick bars, they will use tick
counts of 233, 37, 610, etc. And until I looked it them up, I didn't realize those are
actually Fibonacci
number series elements.
Anyway, to wrap this up, Market Profile and Market Delta appear to have the concepts for
which I've been looking for: showing how the markets move, and offering insight into
making the best use of the information relating to bid/ask/price and
volume, at each
price level.