Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Reading the market

This an update of a previous screen posting of my Schwab StreetSmart Pro platform setup and may help you understand what I'm looking at to guide my intraday trades.
Front and center top to bottom:
The TICK, shown here on 2 minute bars, although I toggle to 1 minute bars for the open.
I overlay the pivots on the TICK and also use an 8 & 16 MA to gauge sentiment changes.
The three vertical columns under the TICK are a nice little feature of the platform that provide a tick by tick rolling scroll of new intraday high and low counts. I use this feature 3 times . . one each for the NAZ, NYSE and the indices. so I catch the full flavor of the market trend in real time. When the market's weak, all the scrollers will be running all red and rolling fast. When the markets are about to reverse up, the scrollers will roll very slowly and will be punctuated with periodic green tells of buying. In flat markets the scrollers will be a hodgepodge of red and green and typically scroll by slowly. Coupled with the NYAD chart, these 3 scrollers are invaluable in keeping me on the right side of momentum, even as the market makers are trying to head fake me in another direction.
Below the 3 scrollers, I watch charts of the NYAD and the IWM in 2 minute bars.
Both charts are overlaid with the pivots, 8/16 MAs and the 3/14/3 signal line, which is the moving average component of the MACD.
To the sides, I have 2 charts of the day, typically the Qs and XLF or XLE or IWM if I'm looking for a closer look at the technicals and fibs than the lower middle chart provides. Each chart displays the fibs, parabolics, pivots and 8/16 MAs as well as my technical suite of RSI, %D and StochRSI. Each chart has its own trading window to help old guys like me from getting confused when placing orders and I can instantly toggle from stocks to option string to level 2 options.
I have another SSPro screen that I watch with similar features, but that screen also includes, news, messages, account details, multiple watch lists and a programmable stock scanner, but the trading screen shown is really the core workhorse of the program for me.

4 comments:

GS751 said...

Very Interesting I am learning how to use multiple charts right now.

PARANOMASIA said...

I like the hi/low scrollers!

I rarely change my screen setup, but I'm going to see if I can do that in eTrade Pro.

Thanks!

Vic said...

You refer to rolling scroll of new intraday high and lows. What are scrollers?


Thank you, Victor

bzbtrader said...

Victor,
The scrollers I refer to are features of the Schwab Street Smart Pro platform. They display on a tick by tick basis the daily new high and new low counts for the Nasdaq, NYSE and Indices. That is, an INTC 17 reading in red would indicate the 17th new low for INTC for the current day. If the display is greeen, then it's the 17th new high for the day.
Other platforms have similar features, but I'm not able to provide specific details. Best to check with your platform provider to see if similar functions are available.