Wtf just happened?! How did Gann work his way in here haha. P V here is an eye opener for you: Safety In The Market was Australia's biggest trading educator about ten years ago. They lured in thousands of people with this Gann stuff. I myself am guilty of going down that rabbit hole for a good while. Check out Bradley Cowan stuff if you really want to get distracted trying to predict markets. Both my housemate and I each spoke with Propex trying to get into their prop program and got laughed at when we told them what we'd been up to. I think it was along the lines of "Well you'll have to forget all that shit". I think they had a fair bit of trouble in the end trying to train guys that had spent too long trying to predict markets, and couldn't just follow their instructions. My buddy had spent thousands and years on that shit. We didn't even know what a DOM was. Said buddy did forget that shit, learned to trade with Propex (not there anymore) and can now swing more size in a Notes clip then I am privy too (100s). I think most traders go down some equivalent rabbit hole / market forecasting trap and it wasn't a complete waste of time as it got me used to handling losses haha. Gann does in his defense start out with swing trading in his commodity course which is fine, but turn a couple pages and you are looking up the longitude of Saturn and learning Astrology.
Yesterday was probably the third day I have brought up the DOM and Tape for the mini Nikkei. Some observations: Not as easy to lean on prices as the US markets ie a lot of flip flop. Will need to adjust to. Sweeps... sometimes four to five ticks which means could be a fairly manipulated market. Something can possibly learn to take advantage of. A lot of volume opened up yesterday and then liquidity increased dramatically at the mornings lows. Was a large CD difference, 15000 more contracts shorted in the first hour. This balanced out within 2 hours as price action retraced back up to the highs. So what I thought was institutional selling likely speculative... a lot of spec volume. When grinding up and down, about 2-3000 absorbed at prices at minor retraces. But need to get some stats on this + much more time monitoring. Have requests some tick data to look into volume flows more closely since my cqg doesn't provide any historical. Just observations.
I will hopefully also save you thousands and years by saying that the Nikkei contract is the one with some of the highest hft involvement among all other global futures contracts. TSE/Osaka is a hft play ground because of its technology stack and because there were numerous loopholes that are being closed one after another. I claim it will be impossible to make money trading those with a very short term approach. I would rather look into Nikkei options, much more inefficiencies there though the listed market is not liquid at all.
http://glover-graham.wistia.com/med...async&seo=false&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=640 There is a video of it. Ignore the entries - thats just me trying to get a feel for this beast on cqg sim. For those who aren't laughing at sim (even prop desks use sim for their trainees) - CQG and TT SIM queue / fills are more realistic than your average retail platform sim so use one of those if possible. It looks very similar - thickness of bids and offers etc. I have never traded E-minis so can't give you a comparison of activity - though it moves up and down, dumps volume here and there just like most other popular markets. Still going to be quite a learning curve it feels like.
I appreciate the input. As mentioned in first post - am aware that is is heavily algo'd. I know guys that have their orders automated + collocated for this reason. I am not trying to compete with the HFTs.. they can have the inside spread. All i am trying to read here is liquidity / flow / orders using automated tape reading and DOM for now. I don't really have an opinion on HFTs. I think their agenda is different to mine and that I would not even begin to be able to understand their overall strategy for making $$. If the principals of order flow stand, then hopefully I can at least make a few ticks consistently in this market. If so - there is plenty of liquidity (by the HFTs) to up the anti. Where there could be a problem is if I do struggle to get fills - will have to hit / lift which could get expensive. On a different note: Osaka Exchange reports quite clearly on all open interest and market maker activity which is neat. Is not really relevant to my trading but I could form a bigger picture bias based on this info. http://www.jpx.co.jp/english/markets/derivatives/index.html Of interest: Trading Volume by Trading Participant. Open interest by trading participant. List of market makers: http://www.jpx.co.jp/english/deriva...ker/tvdivq0000003l9t-att/b5b4pj0000015gia.pdf
You keep on saying you are not competing with algos in this game but really those are the ones you are exactly competing with. At least they are looking out for guys like you and employ all sorts of obfuscation to entice other, dummer dma algos or human traders to turn over orders. Trading as short term as you indicate you do puts you right against hft and all other dma algos in this game. You don't see real volume because it's traded at Alternative Trading Venues and you see a lot of fake volume that is not executable. It's like taking the order book, shaking it and misplacing all the volume and then trying to figure out order flow. It's impossible. By all means try it for yourself but may I recommend you set yourself a deadline after which you move on to greener pastures in case you don't see anything worthwhile. PS The list you posted of market makers is definitely not correct. There are tons of other hft firms that are allowed to make markets in numerous Osaka/TSE derivatives. They provide liquidity (until they don't, smirk) and are not on that list. I know of at least another 15 firms that were nowhere on that list. Don't be sucked into this game without quantifying and validating any edge you may believe you have.
What are ATVs for Mini Nikkei volume? Obviously volume in the large Nikkei is important. Nikkei trades on cme and Singapore also with far less volume... where else do you think transactions are being made that aren't reflected in the prints of the Mini Nikkei?