Here's a better idea. Get ahold of Advantage Futures or RJ O'Brien or Rosenthal Collins Group in Chicago or New York City. Ask one of their account reps if you can go to their office and watch the 6E, ES, CL, ZN markets on an X-Trader DOM window between 9 am to 10 am Eastern US time. It will save you a great deal of time and possibly money. It will answer all your questions. Tradovate and sim charts and all of that retail gimmickry mean nothing compared to you physically sitting down 18 inches away from a screen with the real market in real time on a real connection on a real platform.
If I had a million dollars I would change my own oil...go figure. Wifey says I jump over "c" notes to pick up pennies...I guess my dreams of scalping retail are not realistic...I am not quite ready to give up it's just that this is harder than I thought. ES I think trading sim than toggling to live when the conditions present themselves are the way to beat this system of HFT's. Use the sim to see how things are trading and what the conditions are with how the sim trades are filled...What do you folks think about this? It's important to me as I don't want to waste the next 6 months of my time.
This is A tool I use, it is a Fibinocci top and bottom fan, I can't say too much about it because it is a work in progress.
I classify day traders into 3 categories: light scalpers they trade few lots in a day. they look at charts. they target reward risk ratio > 2:1 medium scalpers they trade tens of lots in a day. they target RR > 1:1 they take every twist and turn from the charts. heavy scalpers. they trade hundreds of lots in a day. they pay heavy commissison. so they'd better be exchange member to enjoy discount on commission. they look at ladders and not charts. they target 1 or 2 ticks profit for each trade. occassionally they might stretch target profit. Exchange people loves such traders. so there are many ways to profit from the market. choose whatever that suits you.
The reason I don't place much stock in exchange futures VAP personally is because it is a very incomplete picture. How many CL scalpers would shit their pants if they had a WebICE CL Swaps feed and could see the 2K, even 5K blocks that get traded within a cent or two of the last price print ? It's a common occurrence. Happens every day. Let's say that you're scalping ZN. There's no way that most traders are going to know the swaps and the cash market volume that is trading concurrently with the futures. Literally hundreds of millions of notional dollars of valuation can trade at a futures analog price in all sorts of swaps in addition to the on-the-run and off-the-run cash markets. Let's say that you're scalping ES. Would your bias change if you knew what was trading in the dark pools?