Why is tape reading not working?

In this TICK chart, I have marked all the block trades for that day, as they appeared in the time and sales window.


# The volumes that are red,occurred at bid
# The volumes that are green,occurred at ask
# The volumes that are black,occurred inside bid and ask.


I have assumed that trades above 10,000 size as block trades. The total volume for that day was 5,035,618.

There were many large volume trades which didn't yield a legitimate move in their direction.

What's wrong????

1.Aren't these blocks large enough?
2.Aren't the pros playing intraday?
3.Are the market makers playing against the pros?
4.Are the bid side trades wrongly showed as ask side trades (and vice versa) in the time and sales?

5.Do the pros support the price after buying ?

Seniors and experienced members please help

If Pros wanted so bad to hide that they were buying then no one would ever see any big lots. Just my opinion.

1.You're beginning to see the incorrect logic of trying to associate "big order" with "right direction." Remember that for every large market order, someone else is on the other side of it, absorbing it. It's not that tape reading is not working, it's that you are making assumptions which simply are not correct.

2.You said you've been working on tape reading for about a week. Do you really think that people who pay millions of dollars for software designed to hide their intentions by using complex algorithms can really be found out so easily from a time and sales window, much less by someone who has been looking at it for such a short period of time? Honestly, the earlier posts between some of you guys simply doesn't make sense, and you're drawing incorrect conclusions from what you're seeing I'm afraid.

A few issues.

1.What you have there is 1 tick + volume, this is very different from trades hitting the ask vs trades hitting the bid. From your chart, it's impossible to differentiate between trades hitting the bid/ask.

As has been said - people placing market orders are only part of the equation. Size will normally have a reaction and often it won't. Tape reading is not a 'snapshot' activity - you are looking at changes over time, an individual tick means nothing.

2.If you see 1000 at ask, uptick, 1000 at ask, uptick, 1000 at ask, uptick, 10,000 at ask, up tick - what does that tell you? That there are more buyers? Nope. It tells you that the guys sitting on the offer with limit orders are becoming more aggressive. Depending on the market, this may be significant.

1.Please guide on what else to look for before entry, after I see a big block trade? How to know who is the buyer and who is the seller?

2.I realize that I don't understand most of the things in tape reading.Please guide.I want to learn it badly.

3. Please tell the names of good books/websites or any other useful resource where I can learn tape reading.

Lastly, Please present your analysis based on my chart. If you need more resources/data for that purpose, please let me know.

I can't help you with what to look for in this case, as I don't base entries on block trades I see on T&S.

Why do you want to learn it so badly? Have you tried other methods and failed? I keep T&S up, but I don't center my trading around it because I feel that it's too difficult, especially in a market which has very high volume. If your tape shows 90 rows, then if a large order comes in, you will never even see the orders. I like to see if a large number of orders comes in and price doesn't move, for example--I find this helpful, but do not make primary trading decisions based off of that.

For modern-day computer age trading, I don't know any. Wyckoff has a book, "Studies in Tape Reading," but in his day he would see prints occur every few minutes, or seconds in a very fast stock, not milliseconds like today. There is a tape reading pdf/video that has the word "BS" in it, I'm sure you can find it if you look, but I wouldn't pay much for it, it's not very helpful to me personally, but then again I never put that much effort into watching it as it's based mostly on trading bonds.

Can you post a 5 minute chart of the stock for that same day, with volume at the bottom?

Please find the chart attached

Can you post the same chart, only not as wide? The horizontal to vertical ratio is almost 3:1 on your chart, please make your chart narrower.

Will this do?