Trading by just looking at live price, bid/ask prices

Is the name "tape reading"?

 

Is there a name or term for search?

 

Honesetly it makes perfect sense. All chart no matter 1 min, daily charts are just history.

 

Tape reading + volume - for me two most important things.

Tape reading is great stuff for analyzing icebergs and the weapon against spoofing/layering.

 

For people do >50 trades per day, I doubt even volume can tell them anything since they keep trading a lot for the whole day. For that kind of rapid "scalp" trading, is that they mainly look at the bid/ask number to determine there is a small edge up/down in next few seconds?

 

I don't think there is any good book about how to look at level 2 data to scalp trade.

 

There's plenty of software that automates tape reading. Been around for years--- Computer power properly used, i never "got" using a computer to draw charts like u still live in the 1970's or something. How quainte.

 

I've been doing about 200-300 trades per day. Believe me volume makes big difference. Of crouse all depends on strategy that I use. For quick scalp volume doesn't matter for me. But for some strategies it is very important factor which support tape reading.

But all traders have different personality, different risk aversion etc.

 

I believe, then what do you look at? ask, bid, volume?

 

arna, can you command something for me to learn from? Youtube is the best way? Any book or research paper? Do you manually or automatically trade?