The price just moves between bid and ask. If I want to sell via market order I would hit a bid at 1583, if I want to buy, I would, lift the offer at 1583.25. The size displayed in DOM are passive limit orders. Just read jigsaw website from the earlier posts, it has all beginner nuances there.
What I love about trading futures is that a small fish like me and large institutions will transact at the same venue. No dark pool and trades spread via 30 exchanges for the same stock. All info is visible, it just needs to be interpreted correctly.
So price trades at the current level until someone comes in and places a buy market order which raises price to the ask, and then it starts filling those orders that were one tick higher? Does that explain the "random" DOM movement? Cuz in a situation like the one I posted I would expect all the orders at a certain price to be used up before price moved again, but that almost never happens.
Do the games ever mess up and someone accidentally gets a huge fill where they weren't actually serious?
Nothing is random in the futures market. Get that out of your head. There is either spoofing (pulling bids/offers right before they get there) or it is true liquidity. Remember that liquidity is ONLY defined by offers that sits above the ask and below the bid., i.e. limit orders. Personally, I stay away from ES order flow analysis, too much spoofing, and prefer to trade bonds and treasuries with order flow (ZN, ZB).
It mentioned the dynamic of the DOM and T&S incomparison. Derivatives, functionally, can be handled at a glance by their signage. Successive derivatives taken two at a time fit nicely into a Johari window. Their pathway gives an precise evaluation of just what is going on. THe Financial Industry (FI) is advanced beginner or beginning intermediate at best. They do not as yet know that if they are late on FIFO, their orders get left at the gate (the walls (or as some mentioned "icebergs"). One of the primary causes of trader and FI firms failures are thinking a limit order is going to carry out their plan of action. trends come in three moves and these folk operate in up down and do not understand dominance nor do they understand the difference between retraces and reversals. sucessive derivatives of DOM compared to T&S sort all of this out. the minority cause price movement as is well known. the few control the many (in voting power). this thread deserves a read on the weekend. The participants classify themselves for the benefit of readers. As far as trend drivers are concerned, the leading indicators generated by the the DOM and T&S combo as as good as any for getting indicators signals that lead price. The lead is about 20 to 30 seconds in terms of carving turns; it could be 10 times longer. Another pair to watch is the BBid/BAsk Trending is going on if the behavior keeps repeating. When the repitition stops, then a turn is carvable at a WALL. as the BBid/BAsk advances, you see in the trending direction a new value and it gets eaten up by first being large then coming into "even steven" (usually around 500), then the nondominant side can't stay low and continually fills up past "even steven. I look for 200 then 300 , etc in the filling up. at the turning point a wall comes into view on the dominant trending side. The two derivatives change sign one after another (the second goes sooner than the first). Simulteneously, the filling in becomes a "What Wasn't That (WWT) as it fails to fillin and peaks and then diminishes. for eeking out the least ticks of a price move, it is impotant to watch the DOM "NOT continue to repeat". If person is trading 100 or more contracts, evry reversal is a set of partial fills. I trade MAT so I see the accounts ripple as well as partial fills. Most people live in the entry/exit world. no one step further than beginning intermediate as this thread shows. Stepping up to hold reversal trading requires A full belief in what you do and using the five levels of forgiveness to stay in the groove. As lucrum says over and over: "hershey just posted another steaming pile of shit". On the otherhand , I see the market and I do quite well for others. I haven't read anything from your post onward so your question may have already been handled.