question for those whom look at the future mkts do the BOTS "spoof" with or without "human intervention and is the "spoofing" done by more than one whale or IB prop desk or MM and why do they do it ? prices do go where they gotta go regardless of the size shown
How would you know if ET'ers get paid or not? Quants AND bots don't scare me at all.. I thought about this, say I'm on some Quant team and I come up with a truly great trading idea.. do I go into the next meeting and share it with everybody, knowing that managers are prone to stealing intellectual property and team mates too? Do I share it knowing that half the people there are going to go home and program up something to trade their own accounts with... or would I keep it under my hat and program up something to trade my own account with on the down low... personally, I'd trade my own account with it and tell the employer where to stuff the job... I think these team efforts towards trading are sort of not going to go much of anywhere.. they might account for huge volume but their ratio of gain per unit of volume is always going to be terrible.. arguably somebody trading a small account can make high multiples of the average daily range, it's demonstrable.. I'm not saying anybody has that capability but it's entirely in the realm of possibility and that is the direction any individual should be going in, not going head to head with some frigging bots that can literally make a decision in a microsecond and never get it wrong, to me it's pretty obviously insane to try that even. I write software and understand what a computer can and can't do.. I sort of wonder if a lot of traders really have any handle on that at all...
Exactly why I don't base any of my trading off what the DOM is doing. Occasionally, there will be a legit buyer or seller aggressively moving mkt up or down a bit, and I stress a bit, but otherwise the flashing of size the flickering of numbers seems totally random. But thats just how I view it, if someone has figured out a consistent way to take advantage of these things, more power to them.
The information provided by examining the book is incredibly helpful but you're not going to see the whole picture just visually eyeballing snapshots of the ladder. You need to crunch the numbers in a somewhat abstract way to see what's really going on.
Cheers. Must admit it was a bit of a eureka moment when I finally figured it out. I agree with you though, for anything other than short term algorithmic day trading the order book is just a unnecessary distraction.