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I believe Mike and Matt had some kind of falling out that resulted them in parting ways.
Who's to say which software is better. Whatever works to help someone be profitable is the best tool.
Me personally. I like Mbox. Mike has numerous videos on youtube showing live trades. He has done a number of Webinars that are useful. He has a room and comments in there. The Mbox package has other indicators that Matts version doesn't have that I can tell. Mbox has cumulative delta for overall buying and selling. The Mbox histogram which is supposed to be an indication of buying and selling. The Swing indicator is not Delta or volume according to Mike. He calls it Precision Delta which is supposed of have a complex algorithm that does more than just subtract Bids form offers. I am not a coder and have no idea what's involved in creating the indicator.
Mike refers to the numbers in the swings supply and demand. Version 3.0 has XKontrol dots which gives indications if the bids or offers are in control and Xpace which is an upgrade to Mpace which is like a speed of the tape. There is also the Auto Floor Ceiling. this is like support and resistance areas that are drawn on the chart if one chooses to use the indicator. The idea with Mbox is to find trades with the software where multiple pieces of evidence or confluence come together. Mike even talks about this in his last webinar where he describes aggressive vs. conservative trade entries. If considering short there should be supply first . With the supply should come selling indicated in the Mbox histogram. To add to the confluence the Cumultive delta should be negative and or growing in the negative direction. The Xpace should show bids in control and the Xkontrol dots should as well. You can ad structure to the equation such as support or resistance such as prior days highs and lows. For a short a swing low may get taken out or a lower high gets formed.
Of course it's not easy and there are nuances to learn. You can have high reading of demand or supply that turns out to be Effort vs. Reward, a Wyckoff term. In other words, there is a lot of demand available, but no interest or buyers, so that is Effort with the demand and lack of reward with no buying. Effort vs. Reward if read correctly can be a nice setup. I've included a chart as an example:
I'm not affiliated with MBOX. I do own the software. Feel free to ask any questions. Images from Miles video that I marked up. Not my trade. By the way, regardless of method or strategy I believe it's the psychology of the individual that is key.
mbox1 indicators
mbox1 trade
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I kinda thought that may have happened, seems fairly common in the trading world. Thanks for the detailed answer.
One simple question - he lists the Three Stooges and two others as "Algorithmic" signals, can those be used as strategies in an automated trading system then?
I am an owner of both systems so I think I can answer this question. What is meant by Replay data I believe is Tick Replay. Matt's system requires Tick Replay to be enabled for it to work, while MBox only requires Historical Tick data. Tick replay was Ninja's way of accessing ticks before they came out with Order Flow +, which they redid a lot of things and made it so you can just use Historical Tick data instead without the Tick Replay. This gave a large performance boost since using Tick Replay is slow. Also, using Tick Replay on higher time frame charts like 1 hour and up is practically unusable since it takes forever to load. The solution offered by Ninja was to not use Tick Replay and to just use Historical Tick Data instead, which solved that performance problem.
I came to Matt's NOBS system first about 2 years ago (did not know about MBox), but then I heard some of the members of NOBS talk about MBox. Then I found out that basically Mike ended the working relationship with Matt (for some reasons), and Matt's response to this was he hired some programmers and copied some of the MBox indicators and called it NOBS. It's like a fraction of the indicators compared to what the whole MBox System has.
For long term, I would say MBox is the better choice because Mike is a programmer and Trader. For me that is a huge plus because MBox gets new features and indicators over time. Besides that I find the MBox tools to be better suited for me, as I can count more points of confluence before taking a trade than with Matt's system, which has less indicators in it.
Mike explains in 1 of his webinars he changed the way (changed the algorithm) he calculates the Delta Volume. The traditional way of calculating it basically counts
1) BuyVolume when the price trades at the ASK price or greater
2) SellVolume when the price trades at the BID price or lower
The way I calculate it corresponds to Mikes old charts and to the traditional deltaVolume charts you find on the internet. Consider these 2 trades
2022-04-19 10:41:01.305050,2021.20,2,57532,2021.20,2021.40,232398718,C,43,01 trade A
2022-04-19 10:41:02.860346,2021.40,1,57533,2021.40,2021.50,232398958,C,43,01 trade B
trade B the price moves from 2021.20 to 2021.40. However the Bid and Ask for this trade B are 2021.40 and 2021.50. So calculating it the traditional way it will count this trade as SellVolume. Which is weird since the price goes up.
I tried using the Bid and Ask price of the previous trade (Trade A) since then it would be counted as BuyVolume. Overall however it does not make much of a difference. Mike is doing something different. Anyone figure out what he is doing?
To elaborate a bit more on this. In this video he introduces his new algo "MBox precision delta", see video from 6m10s to 7m:20s
So the chart shown at 6m10s is exactly what I get and how the deltavolume is traditionally calculated. You have a tick quote line like for instance trade A shown above. The trade is at 2021.2. The bid was 2021.2 and the ask 2021.4 so the volume of this trade is counted as SellVolume. His new chart at 7:20 gives a totally different picture. The changes he made must be at the tick level. So he seems not to count the buy and sellvolume in the traditional way.
I started an attempt myself to redefine the algo that calculates BuyVolume and SellVolume.
like in the example trades:
2022-04-19 10:41:01.305050,2021.20,2,57532,2021.20,2021.40,232398718,C,43,01 trade A
2022-04-19 10:41:02.860346,2021.40,1,57533,2021.40,2021.50,232398958,C,43,01 trade B
trade B takes place at the BID price and is counted as SellVolume yet the price moves up. So that makes no sense and I will count it as BuyVolume. But what I have tried so far does not make a huge change with the "traditional" resulting BuyVolume and SellVolume arrays.
So I was talking with a fellow trader and he thinks Mike might be doing something really dirty. Like using the original BuyVolume and SellVolume arrays and then multiplying them and/or changing the direction.
It wouldn't surprise me if he is doing something dirty because his MPACE indicator also just was simply:
Now he has XPace which is probably the same as MPACE but now he using his new BuyVolume and SellVolume arrays.
My initial attempts to figure out what he is doing suggest he is not rewriting the original BuyVolume and SellVolume algorithms like he claims. Instead more likely he is using the original algorithm and then multiplies the resulting BuyVolume and SellVolume arrays with some number probably depending on the direction and size of the price move.
Another reason it seems Mike is doing something very dirty is because I analyse 1 of the boxes he shows in the video (from my prior post). I have all the tick data on disk and 1 of his MBoxes moves up on negative MBox Cumulative Delta volume. Just like I have. I get -127 and from eyeballing his chart that looks the same what he is getting. So this is his original setup using the traditional BuyVolume and SellVolume arrays.
But after he uses his new algos for BuyVolume and SellVolume he gets a value that is close to +2400. So the number goes from -127 to +2400 yet the total cumulative volume in that particular box is only 3773. So this means a large portion of the volume is BuyVolume, these are numbers you will never see. And it looks like I am not able to reproduce these numbers by adjusting the logic of BuyVolume and SellVolume.