depending on the day. If big down day -1000. on big up day +800 on Tradestation. Have you used Kinetick? is it different than Tradestation for $TICK reading. I wonder if there are no 2 feeds a like. I called NY stock exchange and got the run around. The data should be the same unless it is filtered somewhere. Sometimes CQG and Tradestation are similar and other times far a part. maybe big mike knows the answer.



Sam

Thank you for this post. I think that watching market breadth indicators in parallel with index futures produces a real edge. Unlike the usual bunch of indicators, which is derived from price, the TICK, ADD and TRIN use information from a different source.

I agree on everything that you have written on the TICK, it is a very valuable information on short term sentiment. I use a 20-period SMA with fixed bands. When the ticks exceed those bands I am getting an acoustic signal. I have also experimented with a center line instead of a moving average (center line of Donchian Channel), and this gave similar results.

It is important to adjust the bands to the trend in order to catch the retracements and not the unwanted countertrend signals. This is what you have also done, as I can see the asymmetry between the two lines plotted on the chart.

The chart below shows six signals that were generated during the first two hours today, when the bands were violated. When using the SMA(20) as a trendfilter, five of the six signals were confirmed, one of them was invalid. The invalid signal, although it had one of the highest tick readings in absolute terms was dangerous to take.