ES Order Flow Trading

Just thought i'd share this youtube video of es order flow trading in case anyone else found it interesting

I signed up to bids and offers website a week or two ago thinking I was going to see more videos or a chat room...so far I haven't seen anything...I imagine they are building an email list to eventually hit us up for some cash


this was a good video though...not sure I could watch that kinda stuff for order flow clues but I guess it's all a matter of what you get familiar with...hoping they can offer some good info in the near future

Yeah I emailed bids and offers asking about the videos and chat room as I signed up on the website too. The reply I just got back basically said that he had planned originally for it all to be free and that there was a free paltalk room, but apparently the free aspect of it attracted a lot of idiots being disruptive and people who wanted a full in depth course and training all for free, so he has closed the room. What he said to me was the room was just a place for order flow traders to hang out, not a teaching room and that a video was going out the mailing list once a month or so. Fair enough I thought seeing as it was all free.

On the upside though he did say a course was coming as people keep on saying they want to pay to have more stuff like that video. I've just emailed him asking if I can put my name down for it. All I can say is that when I visited the CME floor or any half decent prop firm, all the traders are trading like that. On the screens next to the bond pits everyone is just looking at DOM'S, so I know this is what I need to learn. I don't know what you thought, but I thought that his video was the clearest and most spot on video I've seen about the subject. Most of the other videos i've seen are just selling an indicator or software to read orderflow.

Originally posted by BruceM

I signed up to bids and offers website...

It seems there are quite a few negative remarks about this person...see links below for some warning signs...I am just being a messenger here...

http://www.talkgold.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-308121.html

This link states the following:
Our Website - www.ocmcapital.com
Our Blog - http://bidsandoffers.blogspot.com

http://www.prop-traders.net/728/prop-trading-firms/ocm-capital/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/OCM-Capital/136897599697900 - this seems to be a sarcastic link.

Another link about him at Traders Laboratory seems to have been taken down.

From reading all that here's my view on it...

I think people will be too quick to point out that someone had something negative to say about him. For example someone pointed out something bad has been said, but no one pointed out any of the good things that have been said. When you look at it with a balanced view and read it all, the negative side doesn't add up. There's only like 3 people who have something bad to say, and more people actual come to his defence who have worked with him. Also it's stated by them, the people who had a problem, that they all got a refund. Not sure how they can be posting all that when they're stating they got a refund when they asked for one. Below is one of the post that is way more balanced.

"I’ve known Kevin since June 2009. Kevin has always been very straight forward & honest. In my 20 years of trading, he is the most knowledgeable trader that I have found & I’ve learned a lot from him. I also know Dave, Matt, Mike & Chris & have chatted with them in Kevin’s chat room for months & totally agree with all their positive comments regarding Kevin.
Perhaps Steve could tell us how many months he studied price movement & sim traded before he started trading live & lost $23K. Did someone twist your arm to make those trades?
Also, I’m confused with Ride The Wind 2 months ago giving Kevin a very positive endorement & saying that after a short time with Kevin they had 28 days without a losing day and were up approx. 42% and then 21 hrs ago doing a complete turn around & trashing him.
And bojangle saying “I am in contact with every single student of Kevin’s” is just a plain lie.
You’re not in contact with me & it doesn’t sound like you are in contact with Dave, Matt, Mike or Chris either."

It just doesn't strike me as a real warning. Strikes me more that a couple of people who didn't understand what he was teaching and took it upon themselves to trash him on the internet hiding behind a username. For example, the people writing something bad all use some name like ridethewind, but the people who come to his defence use their names. I'm not going to put too much weight into something said by someone calling themselves 'Kevin's little friend'. As for that facebook page, it's not as if it has any members, just one person, and if their was any truth behind this, then Traders Laboratory wouldn't of deleted that page. I looked up the prop-traders.net domain name and it's all hidden and hiding the owner of the site, which to me is more suspicious. For me it's clear from the videos that he knows what he's talking about, and this negative stuff said by three people is pushing nearly 3 years ago, them people got a refund when they asked for one, which they admit themselves, and nothing bad has been said since.

I've had a skype conversation with him before reading this post, and he made it very clear to me that what he taught was only a small part of what I needed to become profitable, and that 90% of my success would depend on me putting a lot of screen time in and working some things out for myself. He told me it would be hard and made no promises. Seemed a straight up honest guy to me, so i'm going to give him a chance.

it's interesting to see that some are getting pissed off at all these order flow vendors that post on Traders laboratory..IMHO it is about time...quite often order flow looks great on after the fact charts or a video of the DOM but real difficult to get a handle on in the heat of battle

I'm gonna watch to see how things work out between the 3 -5 main order flow vendors. Jigsaw is doing 3 webinars on order flow as I posted in the ES threads..I thought part one on Friday was well balanced and didn't make promises of untold riches. We'll see how the rest go,...these guys don't spend countless hours developing software, giving webinars, helping users with their product and running a website because they make so much trading with magic software. Would you do all that ?


In the words of zeppelins Robert Plant "and it makes me wonder" !!

Originally posted by stocksster

Originally posted by BruceM

I signed up to bids and offers website...

It seems there are quite a few negative remarks about this person...see links below for some warning signs...I am just being a messenger here...

http://www.talkgold.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-308121.html

This link states the following:
Our Website - www.ocmcapital.com
Our Blog - http://bidsandoffers.blogspot.com

http://www.prop-traders.net/728/prop-trading-firms/ocm-capital/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/OCM-Capital/136897599697900 - this seems to be a sarcastic link.

Another link about him at Traders Laboratory seems to have been taken down.

I've looked into that Jigsaw Trading. From what I can work out he's just pushing to buy his DOM and doesn't offer any training. Anything that's talking about additional software I'm staying away from. A couple of prop guys that I've spoken to say you just need a standard TT X Trader DOM, or a standard DOM that has the same features as X Trader, to understand a handful of concepts and what you're looking for, and then a load of screen time.

Originally posted by Lynx54

I've looked into that Jigsaw Trading. From what I can work out he's just pushing to buy his DOM and doesn't offer any training. Anything that's talking about additional software I'm staying away from. A couple of prop guys that I've spoken to say you just need a standard TT X Trader DOM, or a standard DOM that has the same features as X Trader, to understand a handful of concepts and what you're looking for, and then a load of screen time.

I thought my ears were burning!

As someone that sells a DOM, I can confirm that I do like to sell my DOM. Guilty as charged there.

I don't offer training because it's not my thing. John at nobsdaytrading does a better job than I could.

Be assured that if I did offer training, someone else on a forum like this would be slating me for doing that! This is the nature of forums.

I do give away free lessons which anyone with Google could find and I do help people out for free on a 1 on 1 basis. The amount of help is quite small because I just give people pointers and it's probably 3 or 4 people a month and an hour or two each.

The thing is, as you have pointed out, most of the learning process is having an idea what to look for and then putting in the screen time. There is no substitute for the screen time. Sometimes people ask questions and I give them the following "instructions"...

To get the most from it, I would advise the following 'training sessions' to quickly get you to the point where you can absorb the information.

1 - 60-90 mins per training session
2 - 1-2 training sessions per day
3 - No charts, no browsers, no tickstrike, no audio, no TV

Initially focus on the trades hitting into the bid/offer. The pace of the ticks up/ticks down. The amount of time it spends on the bid vs the offer. Areas that get rejected and most importantly the size at each level.

You will quickly get to a point where you can absorb that information and also you will see how the size is quite telling in terms of reversals. Once you can absorb this OK, then you can also focus on the pulling/stacking of orders as well as levels of depth that have exceptional quantity.

Do 5-6 sessions like this and then fire off questions.


Quite often, a week later, I get a question and based on that question, it is clearly obvious that they have not done the above. Some people just want to be told what to do and don't want to actually do any learning themselves.

To me formal training seems like a full time and painful job - who gets into trading for that?

In terms of XTrader - it's not a bad DOM but let's face it, it looks like Windows 3.1 and it costs $1000+ a month to lease. You can get it for free off a broker but then you pay thru the nose in r/t fees.

Because retail traders are basically lazy and because order flow is this years "Price Action", you will see lots of pretty tools come onto the market that offer you the opportunity to read order flow without reading order flow and without putting any effort in. Such is the industry.

I took the free trial with an order flow guy .. his name is Thomas ... he called live from 930am till I think 11am ... any way, I trade levels and zones ... and the first 5mins I knew I could not use their system ... the market opened on a support level on my chart and moved up from there ... Thomas was looking for buying to stop and selling to begin .. but long off that level was where $$$ were made .. then you know it was chop after that .. I take all free trials cuz I always learn something ...

On a tangential note, does anyone know of a DOM that shows where my order is in the cue?

Often enough, I'll have a limit order working... see a significant amount of trades/volume at my price... enough that I think I should be filled... and then watch the price move away.

It ticks me off.

Originally posted by ETM

On a tangential note, does anyone know of a DOM that shows where my order is in the cue?

Often enough, I'll have a limit order working... see a significant amount of trades/volume at my price... enough that I think I should be filled... and then watch the price move away.

It ticks me off.

I could be wrong here but I think it's only XTrader that does it with their EPIQ feature.

The "E" in EPIQ is important because it is an estimate. When an orders is added to the depth, you know it's at the back of the queue. When an order is removed from the depth, there's no way to know if it was in front or behind you. As such, it is impossible to say with any accuracy exactly where you are.

Still - no-one can jump the queue in the futures markets. There are hidden orders but those hidden orders stay permanently at the back until such a time as they get un-hidden. So if there is 900 contracts of hidden orders & you put an order in, you take precedence.

I have studied order flow for a while now and have created a few simple order flow tools along the way, so have some real life experience with order flow analysis. It is a subject that I find interesting and the study has been instructive.

To really understand order flow, we need context, meaning price structure. If you go back and watch Peter's video in the OP, and pay very close attention, he does explicitly structure his order flow analysis and trade setup based on the larger context of the price structure he is showing in the example. In his example he points out he is looking for a reversal of order flow direction (from sell side to buy side control) because the market at that time had dropped over 10 ES points in a directional down trend price move. Without that larger context, of a sell side trend washout and reversal setup, his anticipation of buy side control would have been random and essentially meaningless (of little or no statistical significance). Going directly to Bruce's point: staring at a DOM or some representation of the Time and Sales stream with no context or understanding of price structure is a complete waste of time and of no value to the student. If a student has a limited capacity to recognize developing price structure in real time, then staring at a DOM is not going to help that individual in any way. If on the other hand the analyst or student has a reasonably accurate understanding of the current market environment (where trade is taking place within the overall price structure), then the study of order flow patterns can be beneficial.

It is my opinion, in most cases order flow is the underlying force that creates most chart patterns. Once we understand this concept, then when we see a typical chart pattern form in real time, we will know what order flow to expect to complete and confirm the chart pattern, thus creating a trading opportunity, as demonstrated by Peter in his video.