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This is your forum too. The purpose of my posts was not to get you to delete the thread but rather to get you to understand its utility, to you most of all.
If you found it useful and your expextancy improved as a result, who am I to stand in your way, but it feels like the posts were more about what others in the market might be or not be doing than about your own trades.
I appreciate everyone is different and there isn't a universal posting style, that's why I asked. But if you are unable to rationalise how the posts are useful (once again, especially to you), I believe you should ask yourself: what am I trying to achieve with these posts? It's a question that only you can address.
Your presumptions as to the utility of my posts are smug and pretentious. Making passive-aggressive insinuations about the value of my journal entries is uncouth, at best.
For my part, I will stop ‘cluttering’ the forum with my posts as I did not realize that they could be seen apart from direct entry into the thread. In the meantime, you are more than welcome to find your way out of this journal just as deftly as you found your way into it, and that without a comprehensive explanation of its utility as it pertains to me.
If we keep it this way, we can go too far too wrong I think. This forum is about completely undefined thing - trading. There are no defined rules, no defined way, not a single 100% "right" thing to reach the goal. And trading is seen by all participants completely different. And is expressed completely different. So what we all can do to help each other - to express the way we see it and let everybody else decide whether they should dig into what we see. I strongly believe it is not going to work otherwise.
I have seen (like everybody else) enough posts with "no value" according to me. But does it mean it's of no value to somebody else? No. Does it mean I have to step in trying to clarify what is "the value"? I seriously doubt. Maybe I'll see its value some time later, who knows...
Specifically this thread helps me to identify some missing puzzles in my picture. I.e. helps only to start asking myself some questions that I missed! The answers are well ahead, and maybe in another thread, who knows?
And honestly I don't see this thread interfering wrongly with anything in this forum.
And I don't even care about profanity - as I see a complete emotional picture (probably 90% of all traders use the same words while being in a trade ) and even this can teach me something (that emotions are bad in trading). And I believe the author explained completely the aim of this thread in the very beginning and playing fair. We could only thank for sharing views, thoughts etc.
A small add to the above to make myself clear: whatever concerns rules of this forum - they should be followed strictly in order not to fall into anarchy
@MarkB, I'll go on record as saying I've been enjoying your commentary; that coupled with the fact that you trade the tape and have no charts to post kind of remind me of listening to a baseball or basketball game on the radio instead of watching it on TV; it requires imagination to fill in the gaps.
I can see how posting with high frequency would mess up the "latest posts" section for others here (I never noticed because I just immediately go to the "New Posts" button on the bar at the top.) Maybe @Scalpingtrader's suggestion would be the best way to tackle the issue; that way it reduces clutter for others but you still have the opportunity to post your thoughts and musings. I believe you can edit a post for up to 24 hours?
Personally, I hope you continue. I dig the way you identify and describe the big players and their actions, helps me think about the markets from a higher perspective.
I’m still here, still reading the tape, and let me tell you, these days it’s scary. The sheer size and volume of the sales on the tape are truly staggering. Never have I seen such a motivated and persistent seller, day in and day out, as I’ve been seeing lately. As such, I’m switching back to a longer term view, which is how I’ve always made money in the past… I never was much of a scalper.
But I digress. My story:
I remember when I first started to lurk around the online trading community (not on this site, necessarily) and I’d just come fresh from prop trading. I quickly realized that the common perspectives that people share regarding the actual profession of trading is often very, very different from what trading really is; and not only that, but after reading through countless questionable posts, I realized that throughout my own journey, I’d actually learned something. Even now, browsing any trading forum index, I see people obsessively pursuing chart interpretation, indicators, mathematical equations, and a whole bunch of other gobbledegook that frankly, doesn’t have a whole lot to do with trading at all! But I don’t criticize, I sympathize. Been there, done that.
I digress even further.
Admittedly, I took the same approach. I first became interested in trading in around 2010 and was lured by the pennystock guru, Tim Sykes. Well, I didn’t spend too much time there because I more or less didn’t even understand trading or investing terminology, so I did what most people who are interested in this industry do, and I started reading. Never having been much of a forum guy, I stuck with reading real books. It quickly dawned on me that the industry was much broader than I anticipated (as an aside, I still read a lot but I mostly keep to economics and monetary policy and the like).
Next, I moved along to Joe Ross, got a hold of a couple of his books and started reading through them. By this time, I’d familiarized myself with a few markets and I used to record the market action while I was at work, and then come home and test what I’d learned from Joe Ross in replay mode. That was actually not a terrible experience until I thought, ‘this is easy’, and promptly opened an account with a broker. I blew that account quite quickly, needless to say.
Discouraged at losing money, I concentrated on my day job and kept my head down, with my eyes on the market peripherally. I’m not sure how much time had passed before I took another swing at it, but I can tell you that in the interim, I’d become a professional trading theorizer. I had theories about price movement, trend trading, risk/reward ratios, risk management… I had theories about everything! I read everything that I could get my hands on and I tested all of my theories over and over with real money, failing time and time again.
By virtue of the personality that God has given me, it is considered by my brain to be a deficiency to fail at anything, and therefore, akin to other areas of my life, I kept plugging away, ever the optimist in my own abilities, somewhat delusionally. At one point, I was working full-time as a branch manager and trying to get in early enough to get most of my work done in time to be able to open my laptop in privacy before my employees came in so that I could trade the market open! That was an exercise in stupidity since I was more or less always strapped for time and already under duress. More money lost.
A couple of years ago, the company that I was working was outbid on their only contract, and we were notified that we had the option of staying on with another company, or staying on until the contract was done in a few months. I took neither option and quit on the spot thinking, ‘it’s now or never’. Not getting any younger, I took a calculated risk, and I started looking for a prop firm. This trading thing at this point had me by the balls for probably 5-6 years, taking my money every year to a sum that I am embarrassed to disclose… so I thought, ‘it’s payback time’. Thankfully (kinda), I found a prop firm willing to take me on - I was probably one of their most motivated and eager recruits.
Regrettably, the owners of the firm spent most of the time trading their own accounts, so training was pretty much non-existent. However, for the first time in my life, I had some money in the bank, and the TIME to devote myself, 8 hours per day, to learning to trade. The firm donated fully functional prop software, full level 2 access to all the books, and a not bad time and sales. As a newb, I was not allowed to use charts but neither was I given instruction on how to read time and sales or level 2. It was expected that I would make hundreds of trades per day in a simulated environment to get a feel for the platform and to ensure my entries and exits were rapid with no fat finger mistakes (trading stocks there are a multitude of routing methods to get into and out of positions). So, day after day, in addition to trying to teach myself about routing, investigating different exchange incentives, backtesting strats on my laptop, etc. I sat there and tried to teach myself what to do, what to look for on the tape, what was meaningful and what was not. I lost more money but at least fake money this time.
However, a diamond in the rough: right from the beginning, I was trading only 2 or 3 large cap stocks at the time, I would be watching the tape all day, like literally for hours straight… and usually at some point before the end of the day, I would get a sense for what was going to happen next. Maybe as a result of my previous experience, maybe as a result of something I was seeing on the tape… I didn’t know. So when this happened the first and second time, it was like nothing special. But day after day, toward the end of the day, after watching the tape all day, I would get another sense – like I knew what was going to happen next. So, in those moments I started loading up my position size. As newbs, we were only supposed to be trading like 100-300 shares but in those moments, I’d scale into a 1500-2000 share position without asking. And more often than not, I was catching sizeable moves with a decent position size. The owners kept asking me, ‘how did you know, how did you know?’ and I kept saying, ‘I don’t know.’ And I didn’t know. I could sense what was going to happen next, but I had no idea how. But for the moment, I was “the guy who could trade the close really well.”
In the meantime, I set to try to quantify exactly what I’d been doing and oh what a journey that was. First of all, it is super frustrating to have such a disconnect within oneself: to be able to do something well without understanding how or why you’re doing it. How can it continue to be replicated unless it can be verbalized and understood? It cannot. And I floundered. And the harder I tried to put the pieces together, the more I floundered. Losing begets losing, and I went cold.
Do you know how much information does NOT exist on tapereading!? It’s remarkable. On every other facet of trading, there is an endless supply of information; but on tapereading, the specifics of what to look for, how to see it, what’s important, what’s not, how to collate everything and formulate a strategy… there’s literally nothing. So, it probably took me between 2-3 MONTHS, sitting for 8 hours/day in front of the tape, losing, but persistently making notes about my observations, making trades, seeing what happens next, trying to keep my losses under control, before I started to get a feel for what was important and how to ‘read’ what I was seeing well enough to quantify the ‘sense’ that I kept having before something big was afoot. The pieces started to come together. As an aside, I remember there was a guy sitting beside me who’d been there for like 3 months and had a sum total of about 3 winning days – once I began to turn things around, I explained to him everything that I was doing, what to look for, how to see it… and then I’d look over at his screen during the day and he’d be browsing the internet instead of watching the tape and needless to say, he did not improve. Learning to read the tape demands intense concentration. Even to this day I am more or less glued to my screen when trying to get into a position.
As I began to learn more, I also began to notice anomalies in the market – just stuff that would happen the same way, every day almost. It was uncanny. For example, I would see big volume spikes at some point in the middle of the day when price was trading down on the day, but somewhat inert, and just because of seeing this happen all the time, I knew what was going to happen next – the market was going to meander deceptively upward, so that you don’t really notice it, and then blast up through the high of the day and the volume that was accumulated further down would be dumped up top into liquidity over the high. Literally 3 days out of 5, this was the play. This is when I started to recognize footprints on the tape and not just footprints, but the same games all the time, which led me to wonder further, ‘well who’s playing the games?’ It was at this point that my interests diverged with the firm I was trading in. The guys who owned the firm were basically momentum traders and that’s what they wanted all their traders to be. At that point, they’d been having a horrible go of it what with the lack of volatility. I was somewhat averse to scalping and couldn’t swallow the idea of leaving all that money on the table, especially when it was starting to become obvious to me that the bigger players in the market had a limited toolbox with which to play, given that there are only a finite number of ways to trade. In this line of thought, I concluded, ‘if I can figure out the game, or who’s playing, then I can play along and make some real money.’ And instead of scalping, I could actually trade, which by my definition is something different than scalping. So I left on good terms.
My ‘aha’ moment, and the moment that led to the development of my market view was predicated basically on that line of thinking. I have found that it pays to combine everything I’ve learned with a market view. Without a market view, traders are swept around with every gust of wind, every piece of news, anything that sets the market moving… they don’t have stability, they don’t have confidence, they are at the mercy of the market. This is always how I feel when I’m scalping, very emotional, like everything is fast and chaotic and I never really know how far price is going to go, which is destabilizing. The people that I used to trade for were of the belief that the market was a culmination of the decisions of millions of people, the motivations of which cannot ever accurately be quantified. They were pure momentum traders and would play when price was moving rapidly in one direction for a scalp, which is concurrent with their market view – when the collective mass moves, you run with it. Not actually a bad strategy and surprisingly, even in the low vol environment we had, they made it work well enough to survive. In contrast, my plays have generally always been longer term, based on the incorporation of conventional trading techniques and information, and aggressive. I am of the opinion that the market is actually MOVED (that is, significant up and down price moves) by a very limited number of people with near infinite assets (in-play stocks are an exception to this rule). One look at a COT report should clue any trader in to this fact. I remember the first time I looked at a commitment of traders report for a market that I was trading and saw that over 80% of the activity was attributed to 8 large specs and thought, ‘holy crap.’ 8 elephants were basically the entirety of that particular commodity. Who knew? That changes the game entirely.
Ergo, my market view: Who is in the market and what are they doing? What are they trying to accomplish? How are they trying to accomplish it? Provided that I can identify the player, when where and how will they accomplish their objectives? What is their long range perspective and how do they plan to get there? Asking these questions, and discovering the answers, more than any other information that I have ever pursued throughout my trading journey, is probably more important than everything else I’ve learned combined. As I mentioned before, there are only a finite number of ways to move large size in any market and only a small number of very publicized large traders and hedgers are functioning in any market at any given time, so if I can identify the players and their motivations, I can more or less ascertain how they’re going to play and judge for myself who’s going to win. And then I can play along.
Tapereading is the missing element that tells me when/where the big players are positioning - my 3d glasses that enable me to see a different dimension. You read a chart? That’s fine and dandy. I can read a chart too if I desire. But when the candle on your chart is getting greener, you can’t see the large red selling orders coming through on the tape as a large seller hits into it. And why is he selling?
Well, if you know something about the structure of the general market, trading technique fundamentals, the market you’re trading, and who has a vested interest in seeing it go higher or lower, then you can answer these questions intelligently, factually, and devise your strategies accordingly. You’re not swept around with every fit of emotion that seems to occur in every single marketplace for all of time… you’re not drifting aimlessly trying to get lucky and catch a wave… instead, you see the freighter coming and anticipate the wake, drifting intentionally, timing the moment, and you play along, content to be a surfer riding a wave instead of the freighter. If you surf well enough for long enough, eventually you will have enough money to buy a freighter of your own which is when the real trading starts.
I am still a surfer but it is my goal to one day become a freighter. That is my story. There are some gold nuggets in there that took me a long time to learn. The rest is just filler.
) and even this can teach me something 
(that emotions are bad in trading). And I believe the author explained completely the aim of this thread in the very beginning and playing fair. We could only thank for sharing views, thoughts etc.
