Agreed. My only complaint on the chartDom is that when I set my price scale to be 30 points wide, then its difficult to tell where I'm clicking on the chartDom given the 1/4 points. On my seperate DOM, the divisions between the 1/4 price levels are very clear. Plus there I also have access to market order button. But I might switch as you suggest because this will give me more space for my T&S window, as per my previous screen capture for replay, and just use the compact version of the order entry window. None of this of course matters if I don't start taking trades where and when I should mind you. LOL
I absolutely agree with i960. When I first started trading currencies, almost every entry was followed by a move against me. Then Maverick74 wrote a piece on trading currencies and mentioned he never paid the market. I started doing what he suggested and I was so much happier. It is soul destroying to enter then have price move 30 - 50 pips against you, because that was your better entry and profit. Sure, you'll miss a few trades, but you can always look for a subsequent entry if it is a big move. Currencies are mean reverting, just like the ES so I think the NQ would be the same? With mean reverting instruments, you can always count on the pullback.
Yes... mean reverting, and you're right.. if you miss it, you miss it, and there will be more. There is no point in paying too much, and if it takes off, then there should be more entries later.
Well... right you were about this. Here is a video I took of the main video I recorded for the opening. It starts just a couple of seconds before the bar updates get very obvious (its especially apparent at 00:24). The right tick has clearly moved, but the 5 sec bar is waiting for an update. I originally imagined that with the feature enabled, it would look exactly the same as before in real time, but that every 5 seconds it would update the bars which might end up looking a little longer in case a poke was larger than first captured. But now I see that what is actually happening is that its not even drawing the 5 sec bar until it gets the updated and accurate data. It certainly is irritating as you describe so I'm going back to the old way, and for July I will try the SC data and cough up the $40 to try it out for one month.
It's under chart. "Show bid and ask lines" and "bid/ask average line" right next to it. It helps greatly because even though the bar shape itself is delayed the actual bid/ask is realtime and overlaid on top of the bar being drawn as vertical lines. The bid/ask moving around is all the brain is looking for anyway.
Ah...excellent... Thanks! I will try it out for tomorrow. I'm not at home right now to even play with it in replay... but I will for sure look into it.
I had both the suggestions on my chart today and I quite liked it! The fact that the 5 sec bar wasn't visible for a few seconds was now no longer as big of a problem because it was much easier to see where price was with the bid/ask average line. Its funny how even though I could just watch the right tick, because its about 1 inch to the right of my bars, its actually difficult to go back and forth with the eyes. But with the average line right where the bar should be, it was much easier to follow. I made sure to mark a bunch of swing points on my 5 sec chart to compare before and after reloading, and the data was perfect this time. Also, being able to watch the bid/ask lines on the price scale makes for an instant visual representation of the spread. Even when I tried to watch the spread at the suggestion of another poster a while back, doing it on the DOM was difficult because as the numbers were updating quickly, I had to try and figure out where lines were missing to see how many ticks the spread might have been. I've never noticed anything drastic in the NQ mind you (perhaps I've never watched this during a quick move), but now with it on my chart, it will be much easier to take note of just in case the spread ever does reach more than a couple of ticks. Its right there, but at the same time not distracting at all. Now the T&S threw me just a bit today. I've know that its not as simple as "a big order gets done on the bid, it means price is going down", but there were areas I was watching where certain levels seemed to keep attracting sellers, but then a plunge didn't follow. I already had a short bias going into today, but it just didn't materialize initially. But, and this is a huge but, even though if I took a short "I" might have been stopped out, I still had the impression that the big boys are loading up on shorts, they then let price climb up a bit, load up on more shorts, and they slowly kept grinding away in what to me was looking to be a big short position. There are after all lots of traders trading multiple time frames. A guy who is in for a 50 point move isn't gonna have a 2 or 3 point stop or care that price rises 5 points. Sure enough, even though we had some nice little ranges at the lows, and then price broke higher, even though the T&S made it look like the selling was more powerful, price still never cleared any major swing points that I was marking as resistance even though it would break higher out of tight range. When this went on long enough, price finally plunged. This sideways action of the past couple of days very much looks like a huge accumulation of short positions.
Markets typically like to gravitate cumulative towards size. There's a bunch of theories on this but empirical evidence shows it to typically be true. I know there's a fairly long thread on here about this but one has to hunt for it. I don't know if the present is long or short accumulation but there's definitely some positioning going on as usual. As far as time and sales go the IB data is just going to confuse the hell out of you. It's usable for volume profile and coarse volume stats but for actual T&S not really. Just get the SC data and you'll be happier IMO. Its also faster to load intraday historical data.