Sure but before replying do you mind shedding more detail into "you are full of crap as usual" ? Have we ever conversed or argued about any trading approach ever? At least I don't recall. Please refresh my memory. A big theme of tape reading was to identify large traders and anticipate that their orders would see more follow through and to in that way identify where the larger order flow was headed. That has all but completely disappeared in stock markets, especially, with the fragmentation via different exchanges and dark pools. Regarding futures a lot of volume is nowadays not transacted via futures but etfs because it's much easier to conceal interest. That applies to many commodities, metals, and indexes as well. And even then hft made it virtually impossible to glean any information from the order book. If that was possible then hft would not spend hundreds of millions on technology to be faster but they would employ millions of Pakistanis and Indians to read tapes, after all its easy to take on some kid and teach it how to read the tape, as we could hear from another user. So no, I am not some disgruntled trader who failed to read tapes (I never tried) but I believe I am educated, well read, and have spent a multiple of half a decade in various markets to battle against each other. No bank, no hedge fund employs tape readers. Guess why.
Maverick74 has a detailed post on "double prints" and tracking the actions of a Specialist a.k.a human Market Maker on the Floor of the NYSE. In the late 90's and early 2000's people would try to listen to Ben Lichtenstein call the actions of institutional players in the S&P Pit and trade off of levels where "paper" kept buying or selling. Basically pit order flow. All of these methods no longer work which is why Mav posted a picture of a time machine
Why are so many beginners masochists ? There is way easier money to be made in various other trading approaches (as if it was ever easy) than looking to catch a train that left years ago.
The problem with Mike Bellafiore is he never actually teaches any actionable techniques on Tape Reading. He talks a lot about it but never really offers exact info. He talks a lot about "held bids" and "held offers" but it is far from an exact science with him. He is basically trading off of "feel". I actually paid to view a long video of live footage of Mike trading from the tape. It is highly subjective. I am not saying it cannot be done now but it would be much harder than it once was. The only hope that I can possibly see is reading the tape from correlated markets to try to guess on what will happen next in a different market. For example, if bids are getting hit in AAPL & GE and SPY has not yet ticked down then it is highly possible that the next print on SPY will be on the bid. I don't have any stats to back up what I just said. It still boils down to "feel" and not science/stats. Think about it, institutional players do everything possible to mask their intentions intraday now. There are algorithmic firms that exist to break up large orders into smaller ones without leaving foot prints. Massive block trades happen on MOO and MOC. You can't coattail MOC unless you try to get ahead of it with market imbalances or some other technique besides tape reading. I want to believe it is still possible to tape read but I don't see the evidence.
If a left side trader, yes that's where all the profits are 'fighting the tape', although that term's a misnomer, it's the easier method once you get over there. If a right side trader, which covers most traders these days, they haven't got a chance and so in great irrational style, they believe it doesn't exist. The so called 'fighting the tape' which "doesn't exist" netted +22% of account this week on 1mn intraday trades, who can't love institutional money flows.
You can read a tape - and at best may at times see where the market is going in the next few seconds - if your goal is to do as much work as possible to try to make tiny gains by beating the 100's of millions spent by the big fish on super computer's to dominate the scalping arena than go for it. I do not recall any market wizards that were tape readers, a few of them had seats on the exchange and were able to front run big orders back in the day. Anyone using a decent trading platform is concealing their size and intent with certain order types that deceive tape readers. The big fish are trading in dark pools off the exchanges. You can learn how to read charts to find signs of institutional accumulation over days and weeks that proceeds break outs.
Has anyone here ever tried to look at Options order flow to trade the underlying? The option market makers need to hedge in the underlying right. I guess that could be counter-intuitive flow on the underlying as well. If an MM sells a Call then he will need to hit the bid on the underlying right? The bid being hit looks bearish in the underlying but the lifted offer on the Call Options is Bullish. Same goes for Futures as well. Is it possible to hit the bid if there are less than 100 shares on the Bid and get short before the Option's Market Maker? I guess even the spread as a profit is not a guarantee here but knowing that the MM has to hedge has to be worth something right?
I tried years ago to trade via tape for stocks and futures, just ended up looking at a forvever changing DOM which was too fast for me to do anything with. Yes you can see there is huge support / buyers at the bid, but you can't see how market orders are going to dump if greater than, it will still tick lower, its only half the picture. Flip it the other way maybe, momo is pushing price down, join this, but learn to read what the tape looks like when the momo is likely to continue, when the tape changes take profit, much better odds than trying to pick a bottom to reverse off. And likely more pts to make per trade.