Currently reading Al Brooks's first book. I am currently up to chapter three. However, one thing that I don't understand - Why doesn't Al Brooks use volume analysis concepts (e.g. Anna Coulling, Richard Wyckoff, Tom Williams, etc.)? Is there a reason?
How could he charge money ... for someone else's idea? Then he would just be a dime a dozen youtube shill. Oh wait that's kinda what he is.
Do you disagree with just Al Brooks's ideas, or do you disagree with both Al Brooks's ideas and volume analysis concepts?
When I first started learning Brooks' course, I was also curious why he did not use volume. I would say Brooks taught a lot more about understanding market context by reading bars on the left. IMO, those are even more important than indicators, volume or chart set up.
It has been said “the best indicator of price is price itself”. Scalping is a quick, “turning on a dime” decision making process. To throw in another component to the equation complicates the decision making process. Most of the time it is best to keep decision making binary. Experience teaches that the range of a bar and it’s spatial space related to adjacent bars can be, more often than not, quite easily correlated with volume, without seeing volume. At least enough for profitable scalping. Either sellers were pressing or buyers were backing off. Price may flounder around for a bit …back and forth….bullish and bearish pressures…but it is going to move where more transactions take place. Transactions are volume. For example if I see a doji around the MA’s that are also turned bearish, then two adjacent large range BEAR bars I don’t have to see volume bars to just know that it is more likely than not that the latter two bear bars were made on increasing volume than on decreasing volume. Samathing but with the volume bars. So, from a discretionary scalpers perspective, one that reads price action bar by bar, and uses PA setups, keeping decisions to a minimum is essential. Looking at too much stuff and trying to process too much stuff all at the same time breeds indecision. It is hard enough trading from a 5m chart but imagine doing it from a 1 or 2 min chart.
Thank you, volpri, for your detailed response. I suppose then that, if I am looking for sizable gains (e.g. more than a scalp), I should look at volume à la Tom Williams, Richard Wyckoff, and Anna Coulling? My interest is in trading cryptos. Given commission and spread, it seems hard to implement Al Brooks's scalping methodology without considerable modification. What are your thoughts?
You don’t see full volumes in cryptos. For equities, you see volume from all the exchanges. For cryptos you only see single exchange. Maybe there are platforms that consolidate major crypto exchanges, but it’s still not the same.
I don’t know but here’s my guess: lots of PA practitioners claim that their method works for any market. If you integrate volume analysis, that leaves out FX which was/is very popular market. If you tell me that strength of support/resistance is the same whether one or one million BTC traded at that price, I will disagree.