I share your frustrations with TS not having a built-in volume indicator. I have become fairly proficient with the activity bar function. I use them on weekly and monthly charts. After years of watching them, I have found little nuances that make levels stand out to me. Unfortunately you have to imagine a composite profile since you can only look at a a single timeframe. The biggest challenge is when we roll to a new month. What stands out on a monthly chart after a few days isn't what you need to focus on. That's where the "imagining your own" composite comes into play.
As I said in my first post back in March, it is all in the setup. I haven't been active in this forum so I'm not sure about the rules about direct contact. For the weekly and monthly chart I use the following settings ...
ApproxNumRows 1000
Default Color true
Mode Type -1
ZoneNumDevs 1
The trick is in learning how to pick the correct peaks and valleys and then learning to develop your own composite from what you see. I'm not sure how to describe that to you, but if can set your weekly/monthly charts to those settings it would give us a base line for a discussion.
I have attached a JPEG image of the monthly chart with those settings. You can begin to see from that image how the current month profile is of no value at this point. And, if you only used the profile for the month of September you would miss the important high volume node at 2928 and the low volume node at 2993.25. That was just two of the more obvious ones for me to point out. Picking up on those little nuances and developing my own mental composite has taken a long time to develop. Look at those levels on your smaller timeframe charts. You will see that they were key areas of acceptance and rejection.
I'm not sure how else to explain things further. All I can say is setup your chart using those settings and explore those areas marked on your lower timeframe charts. Once you have more questions, let me know and I'll do the best I can to help you develop your own knowledge of how to use function.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on futures io?
Very interesting, thanks so much. So you only use this for very big picture analysis then? Or is that more a function of the timeframe you prefer to trade? I'm primarily a day trader at this time, am I correct in assuming that the same approach would apply just by using say a weekly or even daily chart instead?
I will play with this and see what I can come up with. I'll see if I can PM you as well. Thanks for the added details!
No actually I'm a day trader as well. The lowest timeframe I use the indicator on is a daily chart. I do not scalp. I like to take only a few trades a day. So I really lean on the larger timeframes. I will track the VPOC on a daily chart and love when those align with the weekly and/or monthly volume nodes. I found when I tried to use it on minute charts, 30, 60, 4 hour, etc., I suffered from information overload. You can use the volume bars on the matrix to get a picture of the developing areas throughout the day.
Using the weekly charts is like being able to draw a composite. I wish TS offered a VP option. I haven't found a vendor that allows random composites to be built. It would be nice to be able to combine several days of volume when we have a multi-day balance area.
Aha, that sounds really good. I am prone to overtrading and much prefer to take the one or two really worthwhile trades in any given day, but as you mentioned watching those small timeframes can be overwhelming. I definitely will explore this further. Your sharing is much appreciated!
check if rahul gopi has [email protected] ....i had something running recod by a guy called english bob loooong back but was too slow for me...ts not best for vol prof...was ok on tpos...ninja with gom the best imho
I started studying Orderflow / footprint charts and realized there was no good footprint chart for Tradestation. Instead of switching platform, I decided to write one using MarketDepth and TimeandSales provider. Since …
if anyone can help. i am not sure if its free or paid, but there was a post
