Aaaaand another ES victim. There are more than enough threads on using the DOM. Price charts are bullcrap, no edge to be found here. In order to trade illiquid and volatile assets such as ES, NQ, CL intraday you'll need a machine. For thick and slow moving markets like treasuries or some ags DOM is super useful. Generally speaking: The dumber the players the more useful the DOM is. You want to look for big sized orders placed by humans, iceberged or not, you will notice when someone is trading size. Against bots there is nothing to be gained tho.
brokers like 'order flow stuff' a lot. they want money from comission fees and they will do everething to stimulate trader take as many trades as possible for any reason. Order flow software is ideal proxy for it. Add all related crap like market delta, footprint charts, volume breakdown indicators... everething to stimulate overtrading and probably make some money on selling/rental 'professional orderflow software'. Stay away, read charts!
Yeah, your T&S streams and OTC. Non-filtered includes all the probing stat bots. Filtering on 100 contracts shows levels that larger players are participating in. It's all contextual, so if you don't have higher TF charts the analogy would be that your face is 1" away from a full-sized mirror and miss the larger landscape for contextualization. It other words there are more pieces to the puzzle and you have missing pieces.
I would have to say, not knowing "you have missing pieces" is the most common issue here on ET with the new traders. Second is not knowing how to fit pieces together and an endless search for more pieces.
DOM/L2 etc largely worthless unless you're micro-scalping thousands of shares for tiny moves, which is dumb. I used to teach follow the axe stuff back when it occasionally worked during fractions days.... nowadays hft algos renders the book useless... mms flash fake size then fade etc Tape reading is essential and I teach it daily in my chatroom