I am thinking about designing some trading systems based on short term intraday price patterns that I have become familiar with over the years. Mainly reversals. I will probabbly use tradestation because it seems to be the easiest to implement based on my programming excperience. What I want to be able to do however is quantify traded volume at key price levels when breaching support and resistance to help me better gauge buying and selling pressure. For example, I don't use hard stops because I don't want to get stopped out just because a couple of traders are panicking or trying to spoof things. But if I could develope a system to monitor volume at these key points to help me gauge real buying or selling presuure that would help a lot. I have no idea wheir to begin with this. Does anyone know. What software, what books, wheir do I begin. I think if I can get some basic direction going I can program some of this stuff myself or get some of my smart programming buddies to do it for me, but they are not traders, just brillent programers so I would have to dictate what I want done and tell them how to genarally go about it.
Why reinvent the wheel Have you looked at Spydertraders Journal here on ET on Jack Hersheys method of trading It may do a lot of what you are looking for.
Maybe take a look at Medved's Quotetracker and its Volume by Price display, displaying the amount of volume executed at each price level.