Volume is everything. I don't really know how to explain the way I look at volume, but I can say categorically that index, forex, and ETF charts are absolutely meaningless to me. I sometimes pick up systemic moves but I see the forest through the trees in individual stocks (look for the moss...it faces north...lol). I should say that I miss index and ETF moves because the volume of the moves is a drop in the bucket compared with the aggregate volume of the components. I want to explain it as, charts without volume are like reading a language without consonants...you can figure out the cadence and syllables, but meaning is elusive. Volume is the context in which price moves occur, and what gives those moves meaning.
Volume is often called the 'godly' indicator. Price can't move without it - hence volume leads price. Volume can help a great deal to validate if a break out is likely to be the real deal or a fake out. Openings with much higher volume than the average often are often the big trend days. Volume starts & stops the big turns. Haters of volume just haven't unlocked it's real value yet. It took me a long time before I made any sense of it. Most trading books do a piss poor job on explaining volume. If you want to avoid bear & bull traps than do keep an eye on the volume.
I call these 'void signals'. Signals that should be there, but aren't. And they're a hell of a lot more telling than 'strong' signals on volume. Retail traders make decisions to trade. Institutional makes decisions to buy or sell. Algorithms faithfully execute a previous decision to trade. I don't care about the methodology that underlays the decision, I care about modeling that decision in real time. And so we arrive at volume. In it's simplest form, you could look at a fast food restaurant. Based solely on the number of people leaving and the number of bags they're carrying, you could surmise time of day.
Provided price can't move without it, how does that mean it leads price? A good example of this is at bottoms it takes very large buying volume to push equity prices up out of congestion & start the markup stage.
Your thinking is flawed... Price can change without volume. Price will not print/execute without volume.
I am new to this sport, but not a novice in the world. My first post! I am on this site to learn, as that is the phase I'm in. I thought that volume is what moved all markets; of course news and other catalysts influence the volume. Isn't volume the buyers and sellers? If so, isn't it the imbalance of buying and selling that drives the market up or down?