See attachment for some peculiar (to me anyways) postmarket tape antics. Can anyone explain what the big boyz are doing? TIA lj
Sorry about that cg. It would seem that you're the only survivor of the 46 people that checked out the attachment. It giveth me some solace that I am not alone in my consternation. Whatever the weasels are doing it can mean only no good but my guess is that it has to do with tomorrow's mega pump party. Friday is EOM and EOQ so one can expect an abundance of chintz curtains and AM good news as they mark things up before the big sale. lj
You cannot read the tape by a naked eye on NASDAQ/NYSE anymore just by looking at T&S window or reading Quote Window. It's, very hard unless you have software that would decode it for you. The market is moving too fast and prints sometimes delayed up to one second from the quote they hit. When there is uptick buy print everybody sees it as a sale because every brokerage/prop software will paint it as a sale The bottom line is - tape reading is for NYSE stocks with the low volume, and with the skills to follow the specialist/HYBRID executions. Tough game...
Thank you speculatus for your thoughts. I do not try to read the tape on the fly but rather attempt to analyse what it said after the fact with the hope of gaining some insight into possible future actions. There is a great thread on ET by some guy called "maverick" which goes into the art of tape reading in some detail. Not my cup of tea. The trade-filtered T&S is the record of what happened (albeit that one's data provider may not give one every trade). So that's what I try to learn from but only in a peripheral fashion. It is not the core of my trading strategy. Every little bit may help. IMO, it pays to be eclectic and not put all of one's effort into a single trading methodology. lj
That thread was one of the best thread on ET. Unfortunately, things have change a lot on NYSE with HYBRID. IMO, the tape reading is the only reliable way to trade since you see what's happening as things are happening. Let's leave all indicators for gamblers. But this requires tremendous amount of work and knowledge. Is I said before, the naked T&S is useless. You have to see where the aggressive buyer is seller is, and how on the earth you gonna tell it if you cannot differentiate between take bid/hit offer prints?
Say speculatus, Sorry for the hiatus but I've been busy burning out Betz cells. I think we would both agree that to be a great trader you must be reactive not predictive, in the sense that TudorJones (and many others) talks about it, i.e., we use what we see happening as the prime mover for what we are going to do. Where I don't agree with you is that one has to be bound by the numerical tape to do this and more particularly one does not have to be bound by the DOM. I agree that when you have your array of quotes and sales before you that you will be able to say, before I do, that "It looks like price is going to go up or it looks like price is going to go down." It is my preference to wait till some ticks go by, holding a particular direction, before making my move (I call a trade a tick. To me a quote is not a tick, but that is my nomenclature only). The lowest tick chart that I will use is 10 ticks/bar. Just as you have to decide when the pressure is changing, I have to decide when the trend is changing. We both have to decide when the major players are just screwing around. I spent a number of years working as a spectroscopist so I have a bent for pictures and that is why I like to use charts. As for indicators, the only indicator I use is the EMA and in a particular way which I have found to be useful but only after looking at the way EMA and price interact for a very long time. The other variables I use are volume and multiple time frames but I must say that volume must be used with caution. I let the market take me in to and out of a trade and don't use either physical stops or price goals. So as best I can see it we are talking about is different time frames when looking at the difference between what we do as traders. Livermore in his mature years was basically a swing trader but still used the tape when looking for that change in how the market responded to one of his "tests" to decide when to begin exiting his position. In the question I posed at the start of this little thread what I was asking was what the boyz were doing in the post market because prior to reg NMS, one could get a pretty good soft tell about their plans for the next day by looking at the magnitude of the volume associated with the NASDAQ Official Closing Price as printed on INET. This is no longer so obvious. Anyhows enough of the blab, back to work and good trading to you. lj