Ask Al: Trading with Time & Sales

Watching Time & Sales while trading
BPA trading room Q&A: April 7, 2016

Question: Do you watch Time & Sales? And is there any benefit to it?
Video duration: 3min 13sec

Time & Sales no benefit

There’s totally zero benefit to it! Also, a lot of Time & Sales is garbage. TradeStation, if you’re looking at Time & Sales, you’ll see, “Oh, 17 contracts, five contracts, 27 contracts” — they’re not showing all their contracts. I don’t know if they’re just showing the market order contracts, but they’re missing a whole bunch of contracts.

And then if you look at IB [Interactive Brokers] Time & Sales, every now and then you’ll see an Emini trade with 30,000 contracts, right? And then you look at the volume of the bar and say, “Wait a minute, the bar only had 1,000 contracts. How can the Time & Sales show 30,000 contracts when I can see the volume is only 1,000?” It’s because, I believe, that when they show 30,000 it’s the end of a huge order that had been placed and filled – in pieces, pieces, pieces, pieces. And then when the final piece of the order got filled, it pops up on Time & Sales.

DOM trading

And Richard’s going to get mad at me, when I talk about DOM, “dome”, or whatever you want to call it trading. Price ladders and all that other stuff. [Richard: Not mad, but see my order flow trading support for price action response!] To me, I see, I know what’s going on. I don’t need to look at the DOM to know that there are going to be sellers up here [B45]. And I don’t need to know — I don’t need to look at anything to know — or Time & Sales to know, that there are going to be sellers down here [B52]. It’s just clear, right? And I don’t need to know if there are iceberg buy orders below 65. I know there are, right? Because that’s what makes sense.

Price action enough

So for me, I don’t need to look at that stuff because I know — I know what’s going on. So when I buy above 65, I’m planning on buying more below 65, and I know there are huge orders there. And, I don’t know if they show up on the DOM, not. I don’t care if they’re iceberg orders or not. I know they’re there. So for me, I’m much more simplistic than a lot of traders. This is what I look at. When I’m trading, this is how I trade, I just look at this stuff. And I know what’s going on; every tick in the day, I understand what’s going on. I don’t know with 100 percent certainty, but I really understand what’s going on. And you listen to me talk all day, you know. I’m telling you what I’m thinking, and so Time & Sales, “dome” or DOM, I don’t need it because I know what’s there. Even if you look at those things and you don’t see it, I see it. I can see it on this chart.

Get good at reading chart

So to me, I would rather have someone get really good at looking at charts and trying to understand what’s going on, than to spend time doing other things. Also, I think looking at charts, and watching the big picture unfold, is more fun than looking at just a DOM ladder all day. I like looking at the December 31st close and see what the market’s doing. I like looking at obvious support and resistance, and see how the market is reacting. For me, it’s fun. You know, I like to see breakouts like this [B53] and say, “Oh boy, look at that. I bet we’re going lower.” To me, that’s fun. And if you’re just looking at a DOM screen, you don’t see any of that. And for me, I would be missing a lot of the fun.

I’m sure I’m going to get an e-mail from Richard later today, but that’s okay. All right, hope everybody has a good night.

Al Brooks

Information on Al’s Online day trading room