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I'm not familiar with TS's Dom, I've never used it (despite having TS for a long time).
Two reasons to go for X_Trader:
1 - when you do high volume you can get cheaper commissions. $3.50 for ES
2 - it shows the volume traded at the current price. with Ninja you see the last trade but they happen so fast you don't know how many trade there. You need to know how many trade to know if a bid/offer pulled or if it traded.
You can get X_Trader "free" by paying higher commissions. $4.50 for ES. For me that worked out to be 10 cents more than Mirus.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I don't want to diverge too much, as this thread is your journal, but a couple of more points on order flow if you don't mind. (N.B > Mike , by all means move the post to a more suitable thread if required).
1. How would you handle self-reviews of your trading if you are entering based on order flow / DOM ? For example, currently in my trading once the day is over, I go back thru all my trades and log them in my journal along with notes on why I entered etc. Then I go thru the charts again for my entries to make any further notes if required. So on this sort of review, it's easy to look at a chart and see your entry setup and maybe make a "note of a previous bar on low volume which made the set up a bit weaker" ...that sort of thing. If your entry is based on order flow/dom where bids/offers are being pulled...say...This is all in the moment...you can't really go back and review things if for example you have a bad run. (I suppose you could record it, but that may not be workable due to huge file sizes probably required).
2. Trading based from candle price action, I know will not show you info like bids being pulled etc. But it can show you levels which were rejected, retested etc and if you incorporate volume then maybe it can show you with reasonable probablity where the market is going. Your entry is probably going to be late, as you don't have the DOM advantage of 'predicting' a possible reversal say, but if there is a follow thru then you may get most of the move. Or maybe this is a bit too simplistic ?
I welcome any & all questions. I don't have time for forums so this is pretty much the only thread I read. The goal of my journey was to be consistently profitable, which I have been since October (swing trading) & May (day trading). So that part of the journey is complete.
The next journey is to go from 1 to 100 contracts. I've thought a lot about this. I used to have goals of making $x by a certain date (as Napoleon Hill suggests). But I realized that it wasn't a good goal for me. So with a goal of 100 contracts I can measure my progress as I go and the money will take care of itself. All I have to do is focus on trading well & limiting risk. So this is the new journey and perhaps I should create a new thread for it? Most of what's in this thread is outdated anyway.
I do precisely what you said. I record my trading with camtasia. I can't record everything so I only record what is dynamic which for me is the DOM and if I'm using a ladder I record it too. If one records only the DOM the file size is very small & manageable. For the bund I have my market delta charts which I don't need to record. For the Dax I have just a fast chart (currently 1 range) so I can see areas of S/R.
As soon as I'm done I review my trades, or if I can't I render the video into AVI for later review. I have this morning's session rendering right now while I work on a programming project. There was a trade on the bund I saw it and had my mouse on the DOM but I hesitated. A second later it shot up over 10 ticks. I will be studying that in great detail. Why did I hesitate? What did i see that could have told me to wait for further confirmation??
There is nothing wrong with this. Sometimes the DOM can do more harm than good. Sometimes I bail with +1 tick and end up missing a move. Sometimes I freeze like I just described and miss the move. So the DOM is only for hard core with lots of time.
If I did not use the DOM I'd just enter as close to my level as possible provided I had reason to believe price would do as I expect. For example if we make a double top on lower volume then I want to enter as close to the double top as possible. I don't want to wait for a LL or a doji or inside bar or anything else. Confirmation is expensive insurance.
Charts are fine if you use them to see where price is in relation to where it has been, as in identifying levels. One test to see if you're using a chart properly is if someone could change the interval or bar type and it wouldn't affect your trading. I often use a 2-4 tick renko. You could come in and make it 5 tick or change it to 3 range. It's not going to change anything for me. But for someone with indicators it's going to change everything! I can see turning points the same whether it's 5min or 5 range. This is, IMHO, the correct way to use a chart. Kam of L2ST once said about his chart "I could use a line chart it wouldn't make a difference." It took me several months to fully appreciate what he said. Kam had lots of gems like that, that probably flew by the rest of the traders in the room without a second thought.
I highlighted in bold "with reasonable probablity where the market is going". Where the market goes depends on what traders are doing right now and what they'll do in the future. Your charts aren't capable of predicting that. You can come up with a hypothesis and guess what is most probable, but you have to be trading the "now" and react to new information as it becomes available to you.
Context is way more important than the DOM. If you see the market is balanced and breaking the previous high on lower volume, you need to get short. Doesn't matter how. Just get short. Use a R:R to take care of when you're wrong. Risk 4 ticks to make 8. You can be wrong half the time and be profitable. But if the context is wrong, the DOM isn't going to help get more than a few ticks.
If the DOM is too difficult, you could try the volume ladder. I think my 10 months of volume ladder use really helps me to understand the DOM.
I haven't tried it. I already have Camtasia which I really like because of it's editing features. can put together something professional looking in a few minutes.
+100 euros on bund this morning. It was so slow I couldn't resist scalping dax on simulator to see if a tighter stop will work. finished 37.50 euros on dax sim.
Crude & Euro on sim - I trade 1 hour before ES open since I'm not trading ES at that time. +$70 total, euro was all winners but crude was loser.
Then ES opened. I was expecting a really tight range so I thought it was best not to trade real $. Made 1.5 pts on sim. Then we dropped down and I sensed a false breakout so I went long with real money account. I underestimated the sellers. It went down to yesterday low so I added on to my position and got out with 2 pts profit. It actually went several more ticks but due to my poor avg cost I didn't want to risk a pullback. So my initial idea of not trading before the FOMC was best.
Due to the daylight savings time in europe I am not trading the US afternoon this week because it's during our dinner & family time.
Hope everyone did well. Feel free to post your P/L and let everyone know how you're doing. I'm getting a bit tired of posting so I'd like it if more people participated. If you'd like some input on a trade you did just post some info. doesn't have to be real $, trades on simulator are fine. One thing I like about ninja is one can easily flip the dom to sim or real. With x-trader one has to log out first (unless one gets the $expensive version which allows two exchanges).
Just out of interest, while you were developing your strategy and way of trading did you go thru FuturesTrader71 website/material etc to gain some insights ?