Hey Wartrace - If imbalances happen on almost every bar, does that cause you to overtrade? Are you filtering the setup or opportunity in some way? Are you looking for the imbalance to move the market in the same direction or are you playing a Short Covering/Long Liquidation opportunity? Since you see an imbalance on almost ever bar - Do you prefer trading an imbalance you find in a trend? Edge of a range? Breakout of a range?
No, I'm not- I'm not sure that Pete is even looking for someone else. The payoff to pain in the butt factor was not very appealing for him. I should have come about it in a different way - So that I would have more prepared for the idea of my every trade being watched and scrutenized. It was thrown together pretty quickly. Pete was very encouraging and was willing to allow me to work out my issues but by the time I did the room was pretty sparse. My bottom line was that I wanted to help people but there wasn't a whole lot of participation in the room. I might try it again sometime in the future but if I do I would trade more products and have the room participate more in alerting opportunities in different markets. Pete is a great guy and he wants to help people become successful with his trading tool. It was great working with him-
I would call what I am doing sort of "scalping". Looking for 10 ticks on short term price swings. As I mentioned if the trade looks to be favorable I will go for more with a runner. Imbalance is more of a "heads up" and not a trade trigger. It just means 300% (or whatever setting you want) more contracts traded on one side of the market than the other. You can see it on the tape just as easily HOWEVER it is nice to have it sitting on a chart right in front of you. It is more of a visualization of the tape for each bar.My memory isn't as good as others so the visual record is nice to have. Here is an ES example of a volume imbalance footprint chart on Rancho Dinero. I see imbalances on almost every bar;individual imbalances mean nothing to me. When I see multiple imbalances in a single bar OR at the same price levels in neighboring bars it is time to pay attention. It is just part of order flow to me. I look for the "real imbalance" (multiple imbalances) to be on the side where the market is likely to go next SHORT TERM. This is not really useful for anything other than short term trades in my opinion. So it works in trends, ranges and anticipating breakouts. Make sure you check the DOM on those breakout trades though; could just be an iceberg eating every contract that hits it. It would look like a huge imbalance.
My advice for what its worth is to concentrate on ONE PRODUCT ONLY. Play around all you want with various contracts as an exercise in self discovery but you need to pick one product and learn it. You will never have a chance if one day you try to trade the ES and the next you try CL unless you have years of experience in both.
OP (rockslife2008) made this thread on Aug 21, 2011 Was last seen: Jan 12, 2012 Has 1 post to his handle wtf are some of you expecting him to reply ======================== Barnacle Based on your posts Appears you're shillin for students..., yet haven't figured out trading I have a special place reserved in hell for shills Hmmmm RN
Jigsaw is a specialized Dom for NinjaTrader and a few other platforms now. They also run an online room where people can pay a monthly fee to watch somebody trade. Bill was/is one of the moderators/traders in that room. I did a free trial several months ago to see what it was all about but it wasn't my cup of tea.