While watching 'active trader' with the Think or Swim platform, it seems to me that when a stock rally's hard that there is a large amount of sellers on the ask and few buyers on the bid. At least, the number in the red/ask column is consistently larger than the number in the green/bid column. This strikes me as counter intuitive. I would think that a larger amount would be on the bid. But that assumption seems wrong. I'm just wondering why this is? Or maybe I'm just seeing things that aren't there or it's just a complete coincidence that watching this thing for a year or so and that has just-so-happened to be the case this past year?
i believe it'sa Mav,who said it long time ago-size attract the price(or something like that) these days-you can't really trust in what you see. buyer can easily create an appearance that there is no interest in the stock on bid side. one that accumulate the stock might try to create an appearance that there is plenty of shares at ask so guys like you and me jump in and short it at bid,while he can either accumulate the shares or knowing the flow-sell them at ask. the possibilities,reasons and variations are pretty much endless. btw-it was been mentioned many times before(for example)-price keeps moving down and size on bid is constantly much greater than size at ask.accumulation? maybe,but do you know how far down it can go? can you estimate? nope.. what can you make out of it? nothing.
I was thinking something along this line. Since ToS is a mostly "retail" platform it could be that what I'm seeing is "retailers" selling short or selling out of their positions too quickly. Meanwhile, what I'm not seeing is the "smart money" selling to them, as that info is just "hidden" because of the way ECNs are routed. But, Occam's razor would say that I'm making too many assumptions.