Hi, I'm a newbie to trading, have been a lurker here for a while, and am trying to build my own equity intraday strategy and am looking for some good educational material. From a broad perspective and my trading experiences in the past I think I'd be most comfortable understanding and following a momentum based strategy based on volume and price consolidation, and event driven moves. I'd also like to learn how to identify major buyers and sellers in a particular stock ie. recognize when they are entering/exiting, how to properly identify signals or anything of value from time and sales, and a decent read on useful ta I can use for what I have in mind. Any suggestions are appreciated, thanks.
Any suggestions on free trial software? No suggestions on good books for any of my other questions? I know, Im using the search function as well....
Just about any software company gives free trial, you still have to pay for real time data from exchanges though. Give e-signal a try.
Thanks I'll check out e-signal for a free trial, I've used their charting services before and did like them, but maybe I should be a bit more specific about what I'm looking for. Basically I want to be able to program the trading platform to monitor a unvierse of stocks based on minimium criteria I set (probably volume and price range). Then I'd like to be able to program the platform to enter trades when certain conditions are met for any of the stocks in the universe I have narrowed down to. For exits, I think I'll start off manually and set my own stops on the fly. I believe for what I want to do I need to have access to an API in the trading platform; how difficult is the programming involved usually? and for what I'd like to do? I know some VB, would that be enough?
You got me. I am just starting to learn about automated trading and backtesting. I would search under backtesting and automated trading.
What you are talking about does happen every day to most "hot" stocks. As I monitor, I see what you are talking about as it is very recognizable on my display. I can't identify the major buyers or sellers, however. I don't really care who they are either. While not being able to identify them I do "know" that there are others just like them and that there are groups of major buyers and sellers and they tend to behave like "schools" of fish. Once the beginning of the "school" starts to show up others are soon to follow. In terms of volume accumulating on a forming bar, at some times it is not unusual to see, on a particular bar, as much volume as on several prior bars. These schools are relatively easy to see "coming", meaning their beginnings are evident. I find it very unusual that a person who is a beginner would focus so closely on a particular phenonema such as this as something important to be doing. When you read what I've said as a brief statement, I feel it is bound to raise a lot of other questions and probably just cause frustration. For me, I just own the stocks that the schools are attacking well before the schools arrive. In fact, that is how I get to see them doing their thing, mostly as buyers. Personally, I am long gone before such seller schools hit a given stock. I do see them doing the selling, though, because it is of interest to me as a precursor for getting a stock to be "hot" for buying and holding in a position trading context in the near future. Focussed sources for reading about this stuff are rare. I am a parisite of the conventional orthodoxy and on this matter I make it my business to know about your quest in order to front run it, recognize the sentiment shifts it creates and to know if "squeesers" are going to take advantage of it later. The keys to being able to see this phenomena on the basis you want are: Knowing how to select the very selective lists ("hot")where the schools will be showing up on a given day. And second, knowing how to set up your machines to be able to make the observations. The slight downside on the whole matter is how doing what you want to do compares to kindred alternatives that may be as productive. Here is one example. If you focus mostly on price changing and changing rapidly, it may be better to look for situations where the absence of traders opposite you is more hlpful. This is like trying to buy in the absence of sellers. I try to buy just before there is an absence of sellers and there are a lot of people who are riding my coattails. In effect, you get a result that may be even better than looking for major buyers and sellers. There is a thing called Market Profile (there is an informative ET thread on this and not its limitations) and MP tends to show users that major buyers and sellers influence the market to do a lot of consolitating. (They are thinking what they watch does it 80% of the time). Major buyers and sellers are a large part of MP based traders consolidating "down time" with respect to making money.