I just realized how weird this is. After reading your last post, I went back to the original and quoted it, and look at this -- the "@" tag is there in the quote that I made just a minute ago, but is still missing from the original:



My guess is that there's some database issue. To be determined....

Bob.

Just a temporary caching issue. Tomorrow I'll delete the post cache, I'm already done for today. It happened because of all the changes I've been making.

To the Original poster I feel for you. You asked what you believed was a simple question and instead you opened up the trading version of Pandora's Box.


I've used order flow in my trading for about 2 year. I own both Jigsaw and Bookmap. I even own the first NoBSdaytrading course. Here are some things I've learned. I cannot trade orderflow and I definitely can't do it from a standalone DOM. The numbers moved to fast to remember what they did at which price. I use Bookmap like a hunter uses a scope. You don't lay out in a field all day with your eye glued to a scope. I use it to try and refine my entry on an area that I was interested in trading. I found that if I stare at Bookmap all day I will make up trades.

I will share with you what saved me. Understanding risk management and position sizing. Risk management has a few heads to it but I believe the most important is understanding that no single trade deserves enough of your account to kill you.(search my name and you will find my crack spread gone wrong). The very close second is not taking trades outside of your trading plan. If the volatility is too great and I cannot pare down my size enough to keep my loss per trade below my limit of about 1% of my account then I don't trade. Oh and journaling. Especially in the beginning. To me if you don't at the minimum track your trades to see what happened before and during the trade how will you know if you are following the setup you tested and what adjustments to make at the end of a sample set.

Remember there are a lot of ways to trade. Some work, most don't. Some curve traders here don't even use charts in the traditional sense. But that's a different rabbit hole. This thing called trading you've decided to do is a lot of hard work. It's a lot harder when don't have someone that is doing it successfully who is willing to hold your hand.

Jason

P.S. @Hulk what part of Texas are you from?

I appreciate what some of the very experienced have said about order flow being useless at the retail level due to the paucity of actual data we have access to, however, the Jigsaw DOM has been very, very helpful to me.

I use 5-min charts and, when I see what looks like a setup on the chart, I hone in on the DOM and look for as ideal a jump-in point as I can manage. I also can't register the actual numbers because they move too fast, but I can see the little surges and try to use them to catch trades that don't come back against me at all, or very little.

Retail order flow has helped me. In fact, I am recently seeing the first consistent (though modest) rise in my equity curve, ever, though there are additional reasons for that.

Just my $.02

Orderflow is a nice subject, but not really useful in actual trading.

Orderflow is a nice subject, but not really useful in actual trading.