DTG MarketDelta Charts

Since we trade pure price and order flow, chart time frames are really unimportant. We are always either trading a predetermined price blind or watching order flow on entry and not buying or selling on the break of bars or anything like that. There are absolutely NO chart patterns of any kind to our trading. No pullbacks or swings or trend lines or time based indicators or oscillators or silly multi-time frame biasing. One of the first steps to trading like a pro is to let go of the time frame trap. That said, we are not trying to take your charts away from you. You should watch price in whatever way works best for the way you trade and in whatever time frame suits you, but your charts need to become guides to find where opportunities are, not used to identify patterns specific to a time frame.

Since I’m sure everyone will probably ask, I use the MarketDelta program exclusively with IQFeed data for charts and both TT and PATS data for order servers depending on the account traded. I use X_Trader, Jtrader, and Ninja for execution, again depending on where the account is. Personally, I think TT is an extortion house and their product is vastly overpriced. However, many professional execution & clearing houses don’t support Ninja, including our own JBOs at two major investment banks so we must use X_Trader or JTrader there. As a retail trader though, you have many more options. I think pretty much all the futures specific brokers in Chicago are supporting lots of low cost execution programs now. But watch out for all in one execution and charting programs. They can really get jammed up. Ninja is one example. It is great for execution as they have a great DOM and OCO strategies, but as good as the charting portion looks it is a resource pig due to the .net architecture and jams up a lot. We just can’t afford to have freezes and crashes.

Regarding data, we think IQ Feed is superior to all that is out there. Just cleaner and better in every way. We use them for all our historic stuff, internals, indexes, and always monitor continuous contracts in our futures charting for ease of pulling recent and past history. We are monitoring the actual contract from the order servers in the DOM of course, but we feel no need to have the actual order server feeding the charts. Continuous data from IQ is much more convenient and plenty accurate. People always ask what we think of Zenfire. We don’t. It isn’t a pro level data feed in our view for the exact reasons they are telling you it is. The fact that it is unthrottled is NOT an advantage. It is overkill and causes data bottlenecks on our setups. Too much information. It is jumpy and hard to nail the bid/offer prices on the DOM for pinpoint execution in my opinion. IB is too far in the other direction. Not enough information. Neither are pro level feeds. You get what you pay for in this life. Keep in mind, the vast majority of traders moving the market are using TT, so as much as I can’t stand them as a company, I say why not look at what everyone else is looking at when they execute? Transact has also been nothing but great in my experience although I personally don’t use it. It is definitely comparable to TT in terms of stability and accuracy in my view.

Again, we like to have our chart feed separate from our execution feed for maximum efficiency and convenience of continuous data in the chart feed. What to use for charts? The ultimate for the tools I need is MarketDelta hands down. I swear Trevor doesn’t pay me a dime to say this, but I think MarketDelta is the single most powerful charting tool available. It is just mind-bogglingly intuitive and totally designed from the ground up for price traders. If you want to trade like us you either need to learn to read the DOM and tape to understand order flow or use MarketDelta which I think you will find easier. It is also easier for me to teach you that way. MarketDelta is a TON of information that you can become overwhelmed with if you allow that to happen. But you will see how we cut through the vastness and get at only the key stuff you need to pull the trigger. Many people are missing the whole point of MarketDelta because they feel like they have to be using all of it or none of it. We use just a fraction of the features and believe me it is deadly at improving entries, exits, and trade management. We have a similar proprietary piece of software we use to analyze the aggressive prints as well, but MarketDelta combines a slicker interface and the ability to load historic data so for us it is a no-brainer – even though we already have our own tool that does the same thing. Even if you are a two lot trader the cost of MD is only a little over a point a month. I know there are tons of charting packages that are cheaper, but do they show you the order flow? You simply MUST have the right tools for the job. There is always the option of using the DOM & tape though and there are some crude tape stripping indicators around for other charting packages. Just make sure that if it isn’t MarketDelta it also allows you to see the order flow in both total volume and bid/ask at price as well as total and bid/ask ticks(trades) at price. You also need a good way to plot volume at price. MarketDelta is able to do that outside the realm of Market Profile directly on a chart which I love as well. Their profile tool is just awesome. And the software as a whole isn’t sluggish at all. Even with lots of charts and quotes running it is really smooth and never crashes.

Within MarketDelta I mostly use a 4 chart layout (for my intraday ES trading that is) that shows me everything I could ever need to know from a broad sentiment picture to timing entries. I do have a monitor devoted to cash market internals, another for execution/account management, and two more still devoted to some other correlated US and European markets. I do look at a lot of things to form my sentiment and probability hypotheses, but most everything for the meat of the ES trading comes from the 4 main charts. First is the a short term reversal/point&figure chart with bid/ask volume footprints and tick delta bar statistics for watching order flow on entries. Second is the 30M chart with volume profiles to see a general picture of price and volume over the last several days with overnight and day sessions broken out each day. And last are the two daily periodicity charts. One is a footprint chart set up with divisions of 1440 minutes with with volume at price and delta statistics, etc. that I can break out overnight, day, and 24 hour sessions for volume study. The other is a daily candlestick chart with a master composite volume profile showing all the trading from the last major 2007 high through the 2008 bottom to present. I use the larger time frames NOT for biasing but to help piece together commitments of position traders and fundamental/news information. I use no indicators other than total volume, volume at price, the VWAP, and volume footprints/price statistics on any of my charts. NO LAGGING INDICATORS of any kind. I am not interested in seeing anything but actual market information to make trade decisions in my intraday discretionary trading. In my view anything that has an adjustable parameter is worthless. In terms of specifics, my entry chart is either a 4 or 6 tick reversal (also known as Point & Figure) depending on volatility, volume, and speed of trading. Generally I use the 6 tick, but when trading is thin and in a tight range sometimes you can’t see the exhaustion clearly enough and I switch to the 4 tick reversal view. My main screen plots volume (NOT time like Market Profile) at price and volume per bar and is generally set to a 30M periodicity. Most of my trade decision making is done here. It clearly plots key highs and lows from the overnight and day sessions as far back as I need. For the whole day perspective I have the volume at price information and price statistics, but just candlesticks and no footprints. The daily charts are the same as the 30M trading and 6PF entry charts except they look at the big picture. These are the charts I use along with fundamental information to decide what we will most likely do at a particular price or range of prices in terms of direction. Remember, trading is binary. You win or lose by piecing together the puzzle and being right about which direction price moves when it gets to a key level you have identified. This is your edge. From there, your edge can be refined and improved through watching order flow to time entry and/or stay out of the trade if it isn’t doing what you expect.

If you want to be successful, you MUST let go of thinking that specific time frames or chart layouts or any of this stuff means anything to your results. Your process should be like this: Figure out what you want your charts to help you see, then try a few things until you land on what helps you see it best. As an example, I could read order flow off 1M, 4REV, 6REV, 5M, , etc. – any of them will technically give me the same info. But I like the 4&6 Reversal the best as it is easiest for me to see what I want to see and most importantly at THE SPEED I want to see it. Do your own thing instead of trying to copy all your teachers and you will get more out of it. Think about what YOU want instead of just following someone else. Even in our own group, one of our other partners likes the 5M with volatility bands to spot exhaustion blow offs and yet another prefers a blindingly fast 144T chart for entries to see price action changes. It just doesn’t matter if you are trading pure price and order flow. Whatever lets you see what is happening around key prices the best so you can figure out when to pull the trigger – or not.

This said, if you are fairly new to trading or just want a fresh start you are welcome to use our charts. If you are a MarketDelta user you can import my chart definitions here. The links will be at the bottom of this section. We have a lot going on besides our ES trading in the first hour obviously and as such our charting depth is probably overkill for most traders. There are 14 monitors in total in my personal office in 3 desktop machines, plus one laptop machine. The snapshot below is just the charting portion of my main desk and 8 monitor array. I have left out all the execution and account management stuff for obvious reasons. Although I absolutely do use everything you see here in my ES trading, 90% of my decision making comes from 15-60M charts with volume profiles and the both the 4PNF candle and footprint charts where I watch the market during the day and/or read order flow during entries or managing positions. Everything else is used sparingly for sentiment/directional considerations used in deciding the “big picture” of potential opportunities and/or spotting trouble right at entry or during a trade. Although my main desk is an 8 monitor array, below is a snapshot of what my critical ES charts look like on my desktop. If you want to trade like us, these are the only charts you need. The rest are not so important and you can develop your own ideas for correlated markets, internals, news, etc. that you want to incorporate. Follow the links to import our key chart definitions directly.