Friday, September 18, 2009

Reading Market Volume Flow in Pre-Opening Trading


If you click on the Market Delta chart above, you'll see how volume (and volume transacted at the market's offer price) expanded on the breakout to pre-opening price highs. That gave us a nice signal that the break was for real: it was attracting the participation of large traders.

Note also how volume dried up as we approached those breakout levels on subsequent pullbacks. The prices that attracted good buying volume could not attract good selling volume.

That is important information for the intraday trader. We want to see price levels that attract buyers and sellers, but also those where buying and selling shut off. When a price level clearly attracts buying interest and clearly cannot facilitate selling, that becomes important near-term support.
.