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Your probably already paying for cme data if you got the permissions to trade futures through td, I’m guessing they would make you have live data. To view it open up a time and sales window, it will show you every market order that occurs. If you want to see the order book you can open up a depth of market and see the limit orders in the book as well as place your own trades.
It sounds like you would benefit from reading a bit about futures markets in general, the cme has great information available on their website and I’m sure you could learn quite a bit on here too. Hope that helps ☮️
Basically agree. There are also somewhat elaborate tools available, sometimes as part of a particular trading platform, sometimes as third-party add-ons, that help with the display and analysis of the data. I'm not sure what might be available for TDA.
You can look on the Search box in the upper right corner of every page of the forum, just searching for "order flow," and you will find a ton of threads discussing the subject. (I just tried it, and got 150 hits.)
Since disagreement is one of the things that is practically guaranteed in trading ( ), there are people who think that the only possible way to make trading profits is by using order flow, and others who think it's a total waste of time. You can see both views in this thread, and many positions in-between.
I personally have never used it, so I have just about told you all I know, but I do know that many traders are successful with it. Your mileage, as always, may vary.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
Instantaneous cancels of limit orders
Hidden liquidity aka iceberg orders
These 2 work hand in hand to make order flow highly inaccurate
And literally unacceptable to use for trading
Why? Because you form a short term bias (guess) in what the mkt is going to
Do with inaccurate information.
Order flow you can.. see ... is much lower contract wise than order flow you
Don't see! There aelre massive gtc iceberg orders on the books for weeks months out!
In some contracts it's years out. These are place holders or priority holders.
Machines bluff using the small qty. Of order flow that you can see!
If the order book had to legally show every limit order and
If every limit could not be cancelled then yes you would have an incredible tool.
Even if limit orders had to be held once activated or sat within a level or 2 if activation then yes order flow would be valid.
But that's not how markets operate in the USA. You can show size but it's not real.
You can reduce size or increase size you can hide size.
If is see a 500 lot sitting on the book when most levels have 20.. I think about it sure but all I say is wow they have some serious margin in their acct.
It's like poker except in this poker game you have another deck of cards Hidden under the table and you can legally grab any card you need out of the deck and use it but the first one to get the higher winning card on the table wins! Make sense! Hft n those with priority win. Now you can buy as many hidden decks of cards as you want but that takes lots of margin to hold massive gtc iceberg orders ( aka hidden decks of high cards)
So keep wondering if order flow works! It's simple. Are you making consistent money or not!!! And what are you using??
Apologies if this is a low-effort response but I think this debate about the efficacy of order flow trading is actually a debate on what is the definition of order flow trading. As many have said, there's a ton of discussion and vague use of the term.
For me, order flow trading is the use of footprint charts, buy/sell imbalances, without regard to any pending order data whatsoever. It's a way of finding key levels and then trading in accordance w price's reaction/response to those levels.
On the other hand, there's many folks who only use the order book (together w volume profile), taking into account both executed transactions and pending (delete-able, spoof-able) limit orders--all of whom say that what they do is order flow trading. Eg, jigsaw.
And I'm sure there are yet others who do something different and call it order flow trading.
I've read this forum's "order flow" wiki entry, I've read wikipedia's article, and I've read a thousand others. None of them really satisfy me. There are various types or "species" of order flow trading, yet I still can't even put my finger on one single common thread running throughout.
Arguably, anyone who uses volume profile to any serious degree could call themselves an order flow trader because the profile shows the flow of executed orders. Likewise, anyone who uses cumulative delta or delta-by-price (aka delta profile, a species of volume profile) could say they are an order flow trader because delta shows the relative imbalances in the flow of executed orders.
I think we'd be better off being a little more strict in the use of our language, terms, and definitions. But I also think that's true on every web forum that's ever existed. So, call me cap'n obvious.
Truest words ever spoken. No matter how you trade.
Ok, so "order flow" is basically the DOM feature in Ninjatrader? This would be the equivalent of the "active trading" tab in TD Ameritrade.
Basically, it's the number of orders that cluster around the closing price, like OTM and ITM prices in options.
I had initially posted a more robust understanding of order flow, which centered around things like the number of shares/contracts, MKT orders, OCO's, STOP orders, and limit orders, rather than just the number of orders clustered at a certain price. This looks more like volume/price analysis.
To my point earlier, I talked about Order Flow being more a way to hone in on a better entry than as a trading plan in my experience. To that, I held a public webcast last week about scalping in which I discuss some of that. You may pick up a thing or two from it related to this topic. I look at some classic order flow setups, etc.
See it here:
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Order flow isn't the DOM, time and sales box, footprint chart, etc, these are merely tools to view the order flow as a whole or for some of the tools just a part of it. Order flow is simply the limit and market orders entering and exiting the market at any point in time.
), there are people who think that the only possible way to make trading profits is by using order flow, and others who think it's a total waste of time. You can see both views in this thread, and many positions in-between. 
