I don't see the reason for all the inner conflict. Some days the market conditions lend themselves to scalping..Other days, there are conditions that warrant holding trades for bigger moves. You obviously have the ability to scalp and catch runners. Why denigrate yourself for scalping when the only thing that matters is the end results . The real secret to this is determining what the prevailing market conditions are for a given day and utilizing the appropriate strategy for those conditions. Some days should be scalped..other days the trades can be held longer.

GARY AND ALL,

Many of us need a move of 20,sometimes 40 pips before we can confirm, be it a by a moving average or 2 higher lows that a trend actually is in place. The frustration of thE er/usd this whole month is we dont even get a 40 pip straight move all day and night. And then "if" we get it, but it seems this august to have come at some early oddball hour like 11"30pm est and there is nothing but sideways action till next day. Look at tonight,perfect example. Its 6:30am...end of the 3 day weekend...where was the rush of money flowing into Forex between 2-5am we always get? On a long weekend yet! I sware I will never complain if we go back to the times of rediculous viotility, where it6 takes 3 stop outs to catch your train, i wont complain. But something is changing in the markets, all of em. Cant you guys smell it!??? Looks to me like we are going to see a lot of "pro" traders going broke, being shaken out, not by bad plays but by waiting for moves that no longer happen with enough regularity to make trading profitable. We will see a shakeout of people going back to work again....(creating more strain on our supposed healthy economy) and then maybe in a year or 2, markets will become wild ,erratic and a new breed will come forth. WHY DO ALL OF YOU NOTICE SO MANY MORE VENDORS AND PEOPLE TEACHING "because they love teaching" more now that ever before? Cause the prose are making so little it aint even worth it. Just my 2 cents.

The short of it is that in NT I do have a 30 minute chart up with RTH volume profiles, using the GomMP indicator, based on tick data, so I don't have to fiddle with recording. I have tried the footprint/ladder and find it a waste of time for me personally. It is essentially redundant information, and focusing on this causes me to lose focus on other things which are actually important to me. However, all anyone can do is try it and see how you like it; who knows, maybe it will be your favorite tool.

What you will find if you plot volume at price over a region is that the prices with the lowest volume will often align with areas of support and resistance on the price chart. The logic should be clear why, as the edges of a range are just that--edges, which are quickly rejected, thus trading very little volume at these edges. I won't go into a big spiel about auction market theory and how profiles can be interpreted, as you probably know much of this. I try to simply see volume profile for what it is: a histogram that shows how much volume traded in the past at each price.

It is simply another way to view or map the market, much like using price for support and resistance, EW, Gann, or anything else. One of the reasons I do not rely heavily on volume profiles beyond an intraday basis is that it heavily weights the RTH hours for an instrument, due to heavy volume during regular hours. However, when a market like CL is not trading, it is being influenced heavily by other world markets--lack of overnight volume does not make the market any harder to move, in fact it's much easier! So, I do not plot long-term profiles very often due to the fact that I feel overnight price levels are almost as important as RTH price levels. I posted about this in the volume profile thread I think, but I am getting too tangential here.

The other day I was reading some writings by Wyckoff from 1932. I could not help but smile as he plotted his point and figure chart as a way of tape reading, and he talked about "4500 shares traded over" some price range. He essentially was plotting volume at price. And what you do Gary is somewhat of the Wyckoff school, and volume profile is kind of another side of the same die. What you are using your 1 minute chart is to observe heavy volume activity, both in a small period of time (hence the 1 minute), and in a particular range of prices. No matter how we frame markets, it's all the same market, and it's not that different at all from 80-90 years ago when Wyckoff was trading. Kind of amazing actually.