Maybe you're right, I never looked at a volume-bar chart. What platform do you use or would recommend for volume-bar chart? Could you please post a volume-bar ES chart of Friday (or any day last week) for comparison purposes? I'm curious!
Start by using volume to screen which markets have the most activity. Increasing volume on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. That's where the money flow is. See if the price is going up or down. Join the trend at a good entry. Money flows to different markets based on macroeconomic trends which are the most profitable. Real Estate ten years ago. Oil 4 years ago. Equities the past few years---short, then long. How can volume not help? For instance Natural Gas has had a serious contraction in net trading volume. It had been serious sell on volume and then over the past 2 years volume has been slowly drying up. We will bottom for sometime and when the volume starts flowing again into the market BAM!!!
Each volume bar will take a variable amount of time to complete, correct? How does that eliminate the variable aspect of time? Unless you mean time isn't a factor because your charts don't include time.
MultiCharts, Sierra Charts, Trade Navigator and NinjaTrader are the only charting program that create the Volume bars correctly by allowing the user to define the number of contracts or volume per bar and then cap the bars to make them exact. Here is a 2401 CVB chart for the last week. I would have posted a faster one by volume has been pretty slow this week. The gap you see between the 10th and 11th is just eSignals contract roll over from March to June on the continuous feed contract. This is a 24 hour chart as well.
There's some stuff out there that has been reliable +80% or higher since 1975. However, you aren't going to find them via search words like "market cycles" via Google or any forum discussion search. Mark
Markets are traded in contracts or shares not minutes so an accurate representation of price is a chart constructed without time being a factor. Time is important for remembering when the market opens and closes, when reports are due to come out or what time Bernie is speaking but time isn't relevant to the normal flow of supply & demand. No one, including institutional traders ONLY place their orders at certain times of the day, they place there orders whenever they need to, whenever the markets will absorb the order. The only things that are a constant in the market are price and volume. The amount of contracts or shares traded on any given minute of any given day is a variable. It is NEVER a constant. This is why you see drastic spikes on your charts immediately following reports and see narrow thin bars in the overnight. My charts do not show either of those abnormalities. Using constant volume bars allow you to see the natural cycles that minute charts will never let you view.
Thanks for the demo Prof! Well, the price action looks MUCH more smoother is much more trendy without that noise! That's its biggest advantage, definitely, and one that kills the time charts. I'll def give it a try. Thanks again! What would you say about Investor RT? http://www.linnsoft.com/tutorials/periodicities.htm They offer volume bar charts.
Regardless of the indicators you use the charts are 100 times smoother. As far as RT, ask whether the volume bars are capped.