Underlining above is mine. I trade from a 15 min chart and a 3 minute chart to break the 15 min bar into 5 segments. I am looking at price and volume. I often look for periods of accumulation or distribution followed by stops being taken out. Using price and volume, I can usually tell which way the market will eventually break from a plateau and when it does i am ready to hop aboard for the ride. Today, The ER2 traded less than 5000 contracts all afternoon until 3:35 est. This was not a good day to trade the ER2 and your underlined point above is why. Yesterday, on the other hand was a good day and the price/volume signals were loud and clear, and there were plenty of volume bars in the afternoon near 5K or above.
Zdawg - I would love to use tick charts as I find them smoother than price as well, but TOS does not yet have user-defined ticks. The two they have don't work for me. TOS does so many other things well that I don't want to switch. I trade ES and YM using just a five minute chart and a moving average in dots instead of lines. Helps me visualize things better. Ansare