Finding the Top of a Major Swing

The hardest thing for me to do as you will know if you are a regular reader of this blog is to hold onto a trade. I've been working on this issue for the whole of my trading life.

The charts below show how such a major top or bottom can be found. Its a matter of using order flow at the right context spots. The bar charts shows the latest tools I use. The buttons at the top of the chart allow me to have Flo trigger trades that meet most combinations of context and order flow combinations. The human eye is still needed as yet to verify the context. The second chart - Market Profile - shows the split's POC that held the market twice. The bar chart shows the reversal of the order flow at the right context for that chart. All that is needed is to have enough contracts so you can scale out at relevant chart areas.

 

Why Algos Work!

One of the reasons that algos for hybrid trading work so well is that it makes me focus on what's important and to ignore what's not.

Recent studies, talked about here, show that if you know what to ignore you can focus on what's important. The article is well worth a read.

Applying that to trading means that I create a trading plan and then strengthen my ability to stick to that plan by having an algo do the triggering based on the rules in my trading plan but only after I arm it for each specific trade after I have determined that the extra context components of the TP are present.

This means I have plenty of time before the trade triggers to arm my algo and then let it shoot the order with just 1 ms of latency when all the rules are met.

As the Great One said, "how sweet it is".

Numbers and Orderflow and Algos

Writing this waiting for the monthly unemployment numbers.

The pic tells the story. Selling revealed itself after the market went overbought. It sold all the way down to the POC of the day's Volume Profile. I've been doing a lot of work on using Volume Profiles intra day and I'll be showing more about that. We've got a lot of information about order flow in our data stream and we have the technology to reveal the information we need to trade CP. Its now just a matter of learning how to use it. We're in very competative markets. We are competing against a lot of smart people and HFTs. Using algos is a must for most of us if we are to succeed.

The markets liked the number, at first but over cooked it. Then the opportunities showed themselves. The buttons at the top of the chart allow me to place trades based on a combination or orderflow and context. Go Flo.