I think people who claim that they can have an edge by looking at DOM are sales people who sell their products or services. But who knows? I am still learning everyday like yourself.
Hi, ET members like Scientist, Handle123, etc., did discuss about how to use DOM info for trading: http://www.elitetrader.com/et/index.php?threads/dom-acv-and-bid-ask-wall-used-tgether.103293/ A related topic is footprint chart. Unfortunately, I do not have enough brain power to process the above information. Hence, I just ignore them most of the time.
Most of you guys are wasting your time. You need to find things that work more often than not, or things that tend to be a coin toss but offering meaningful reward during those coin tosses. Need to research, document, and tabulate, pure objective statistical results, not what you think or feel. Such things will not be found in DOMs, Bid/Ask imbalances, indicators or snake oil services. Starting point should be pure price, price structures and lines, learn how to detect a portion of traders that are trapped, not just bulls and bears, but trend followers, reversion to the mean traders, etc. Forget classic signals, it's 2015 not the 1970s, do your best to find a group of traders crying like babies. Their pain, should be your gain. Stop trying to predict market direction and give in to detecting trader pain. Anything else you will be too slow to find a meaningful edge.
I agree, ES much tougher for many if you can't trade well with NQ/YM. Those markets tend to trend better than ES. ES offers many more scalping moves and less trends on consistent basis. I trade first 90 minutes of day session and will do 3-30 trades. If too volatile I won't trade at all, New York uses ES as a hedge, so I expect normal controlled movements, when traders are scared, lack of volume makes markets jump and I am unwilling to expand risk which to me would become random movement. Studying the DOM is easier in ES cause of heavier volume, you can tell and with time when price will move up or down either getting in better or avoiding trades, other markets makes it unable to do for me cause lack of volume.
An adept futures trader will rock the NQ/ES/YM/TF, when your technique is good, you succeed at all of them. All these posters switching futures for hope of success are switching the wrong thing about their trading, its not the instrument, its their technique.
Every futures instrument has it's own personality, just like every stock does not trade exactly with the next one. ES doesn't trade like TF, so you can't expect to do counter-trend trades, that do well in ES will work in TF, so I disagree that same technique that works in ES will work in markets that are more the "run and gun" markets. I never do counter-trend intraday in other Indexes, whereas almost all my entries in ES are counter-trend.