no, i'm not a pit trader, but i've a friend who was and he told me stories happening in the pit... anyway, keep in touch since we are in SG.. and pls do feedback if all those "tape reading" software works for you or not... (because i've already tried and its seem harder to read emotion in ETS vs Outcry.)
topgunsoftware & TM BS Watcher : Hi guys, take it easy alright Trading is already a extremely difficult endeaver. I am glad there are people like you guys who have the vision and ideas to bring your products to fruition. I believe you have helped quite a few traders put some money into their pockets. Cheers.
Again, I felt bad about my post and after I got back from lunch tried to delete it but it wouldn't let me so I decided to apologize. As far as delays in quotes I am not alone in experiencing this and I found it both using PATS data and eSignal. I've read numerous people complain about the PATS feed so in those cases I believe the previous poster. However when it comes to comparing Trade Maven running in eSignal simulation mode to eSignal's charts, BOTH using the same data stream, when Trade Maven runs behind for 3 to 5 seconds I do blame that program. That's why I still believe it is written on the .NET platform. Most C++ programs don't get behind like that and have a more robust feel. Try Velocity Futures X Trader platform, for example, its rock solid and never feels like the software is eating up too many CPU cycles. They are also our competitor but there is no denying how good and solid that platform is. Sounds like a fantastic feature that I missed when trying the demo last August. Hey I give Trade Maven props for putting in some very useful features. I have never made mention of Trade Maven not being popular. The fact is I even like it myself and once traded with it. My only comment and this is from personal experience as well as reading other people's posts in the past is that it sometimes falls behind. That is the 100% honest truth and if anybody wants me to provide video proof of this I'd be happy to do so, it may take a week to find very fast markets where the trade rate skyrockets and TM falls behind but I've seen it happen on multiple occasions and anybody who has used it for at least a month has seen it happen at least once. It doesn't happen everyday and I never said it happened often but it DOES happen and I believed it was due to the .NET framework. I can concede I could be wrong about the .NET but I've never seen that happen in robust C++ applications. Listen I felt bad about what I said and honestly wanted to see if other traders had the same problems with TM I have. I did apologize for my comments and hoped that the thread would end or there'd be real discussion about it. Even if I didn't produce a competing product I probably would have made the same comment, I just wouldn't have apologized about it afterward. My goal is not to bad mouth Trade Maven, again I do like the program, they have some very cool ideas. I agree and I had hoped my apology would have ended this. Once a post is up for over an hour you can't edit it so instead I wrote an apology. Hey I am 100% open for any ideas or comments that can improve our product! Please post each and every negative comment about our product. If we agree with them we'll improve our product. In the end giving traders tools that help them improve their trading and make more money trading is our only focus. No program is 100% perfect and ours has issues we are working on improving as well as there are a slew of features we are working on adding now that aren't in any other program. I know I personally need to do a much better job creating more educational material. I don't think its desperate to talk about trading tools that give traders an edge and providing educational training. I trade every day, we actually use our software to make money trading. I also have recently been video taping my trading live and posting the videos right after trading. I doubt anybody else has the confidence in their trading to expose themselves to public scrutiny. I with competing software companies would do the same, <b>if you can't make money with your OWN product and prove it than why should others use it?</b> I have shared about 10 trading methods and how people can use them to make money. Many of the strategies I've posted you don't need to use our software to implement. My main goal for posting is yes to get people to try our software but also equally high in my mind is to find new ideas to put into our software. We also develop black box trading systems and I am talking to a few traders now that I've met online to implement their trading strategies. Sharing strategies that work and helps improve people's trading leads them to share their ideas with me and my trading has improved by this process. I feel the same way. I truly like your product, it has many features not found in most other trading platforms and it makes trading feel more 'intuitive' which I have only found in your application, ours, and custom studies I've programmed in Investor RT which I love. Again I apologize for my post and wish I had not made it. I do like Trade Maven and would probably trade with it for futures if I didn't use our own software. One reasons I like our product better than anything else out there is because we started as a stock scanning and execution firm, I actually watch and use our advanced scans to let me see which stocks in the S&P eminis are strong, weak, above or below their first 30 min bar high/low, what their Volume% is (this lets me know in the first 10 mins of trading if today will be a trend day or sideways consolidation day) etc. These kind of 'market breadth' tools and our sector analysis tools aren't in any other program. They give me more confidence and if you watch my <a href="http://www.topgunsoftware.com/videotraining.html">live trading videos</a> you will see my market direction calls are close to 90% accurate. I'd love to see other people video tape their trading and give reasons for their thinking.
TopGun Strategy Question... Q1) In your NYSE Buy/Sell Pressure Indicator you said that you analyze every trade in the NYSE market and categorize the sells as trades at the bid or lower and buys as trades at the ask or higher - DOES YOUR SOFTWARE THROW OUT THE TRADES BETWEEN THE BID/ASK AS BEING AMBIGUOUS... (THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF TRADES THAT GO OFF BETWEEN THE BID/ASK) Q2) Why don't you ALSO show an indicator of the Buy/Sell Pressure just for the sp500 index stocks - showing either confirmation with the NYSE Buy/Sell Pressure indicator or divergence (Big Money Painting the Tape?) cj:
1) NYSE Volume and our Buy/Sell Pressure are two completely different indicators. The NYSE volume and our NASD (NASDAQ) Volume indicator simply shows the amount of volume flowing during each bar into up stocks vs down stocks. It's an extremely useful market sentiment indicator and you can see from a <a href="http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=43472">trading journal</a> I've posted over the last few weeks it usually predicts direction during the next 30 minutes. No we do NOT throw out trades between the bid/ask. Our buy/sell pressure was written in a weekend, however optimized over many months of real world trading. Our first version we only counted trades going off on the bid or lower and the ask and higher but found as you said it ignored in some stocks with wide spreads a LOT of the volume. So without giving away all of the dozen or so rules we use to do this for stocks we do count volume between the bid and ask. For example one rule states that if the bid increases and the ask increases between this and the last trade and there is a print in between the bid/ask we count that as buying. The amount of rules we have in this to get rid of trades impossible to determine if its aggressive buying/selling took us a long time to come to and since I actually use this tool for my own trading I insisted that we not give up on it until it was as close to perfect as we can make it. Stocks are tough to analyze compared to the emini futures which always print at the bid or offer. Is our tool 100% perfect, absolutely not because stocks bid/asks get locked, crossed, etc and we have rules in there to throw out impossible to determine trades both in real time and using historical tick data we download. 2) To answer your other question yes we do have in our next 3 month development schedule to show you cumulative BLOCK volume going off at the bid/ask of the individual stocks that makeup the S&P. We will very likely only analyze the top 100 as that is about 67% of the S&P500 and from my testing works fantastic. When I trade futures I actually watch the top 10 S&P stocks and have the buy/sell pressure analyzing trades that are block. We wrote a separate program for Excel that shows us every trade size that went off over the last 5 days and I look at the top 10% of trade size for each individual stock. It clearly lets me see institutional buying immediately as its occurring. As far as I know no other product lets you analyze stock block trades in real time and historically as ours does. I'd be happy to post pictures of today's session if anybody wants to see them. They are one of the most predictive tools I use. You'll see this in our product in 3 or 4 months and we will distill this data among the 'basket' of stocks you pick to see aggressive block buying/selling.
Hi Diamond, I was contacted by Trade Ideas many months ago about integrating it into our product. What I had considered doing was letting traders do double scans, ie use their software to find some stock situations our software doesn't scan for and then put this list into our hotlists and narrow the list down into a better and smaller list by using our %Volume scans and others. The real benefit of this would be once the stocks showup in the scans you could also multilink them to up to 20 charts and always see the top 20 stocks in the scan OR the latest 20 symbols. They would just popup automatically on your charts as soon as they showed up. Do you feel you and other traders would want this, in other words is it worth our time to integrate trade ideas into our charting and Level II direct access platform?
Thanks TopGun... , excellant answers... i appreciate you detailing some of the developemental thoughts and strategy that went into the design model of your software... gives me more confidence to believe in what your special indicators are showing... cj...
No need to be suspicious, tape reading and bid/ask analysis works, especially when you watch what the world's largest traders are doing. Reading the tape is one of the best ways to identify what is really going on in any given stock. Few people can tape read and no human can read the tape on hundreds of stocks. Our software is the only one on the market that can analyze all the trades going on in up to 1,000 stocks and show you visually whether people are aggressively buying (taking the offer) or aggressively selling (hitting the bid). Here is a perfect example today in YHOO. It gapped up today and you can see in our Buy/Sell Pressure that there was more selling on the bid than buying on the offer. The second column shows what 5,000+ share traders were doing. They did a little net buying on the first bar, moreso on the second but on the second rally up to the highs the big traders were net sellers even on UP bars. Many traders would have anticipated a breakout in YHOO but when selling dominates buying you won't see a breakout and can instead short the double top. The third indicator is our custom volume indicator that shows total volume for the bar plus the statistical average volume for that bar. It lets you see immediately if volume is above or below normal for this time of the day and I use it to decide to go with breakouts or to fade them. <a href="http://www.topgunsoftware.com/"><img src="http://www.topgunsoftware.com/elitetrader/yhoo020205.gif" border=0></a>