Mastering the Trade.

This seems a very good book for me. Focus on setups and market internals. Tangental with my ideas of learning patterns and market psychology, rather than the "Holy Grail" indicator. Excelent ideas on trading psychology. Current takeaways; I need to formalize some of my setups so that I can see which ones are working, and which ones do not. This may lead to trading less, as currently I have a need to be in the market "all the time". That is a pretty bad habit. Perhaps a move to the 5-minute chart would facilitate a bit more patience?

Relative Volume

Being able to identify whether volume for a given period in the E-Minis futures contract is higher or lower than the average volume for that period is a valuable trading tool. Traditional moving averages do not do a good job here as volume is highly correlated to time of day. Specifics on the usefulness of relative volume have been covered in detail by others; I will limit this post to providing some thinkScript code for ThinkOrSwim that plots relative volume on a volume chart. This code does a lookback over the previous 10 trading days, and provides a line graph of average volume for the current trading session, overlayed on the volume chart.

# JBAKER RelativeVolume in ThinkScript
# Inputs; set period to the chart period
# Default for period is 30 minutes
# Do not include data for AH/premarket; this will skew the RelativeVolume plot
# This study is an overlay on the volume chart; you must show volume for this study to be visible.

declare upper;
declare zerobase;
declare on_volume;
declare real_size;

input period = 30;
Def multi = (390/period); # minutes per trading day

# Relative Volume code

plot VolRelativeAverage = (volume[multi] + volume[2*multi] + volume[3*multi] + volume[4*multi] + volume[5*multi] + volume[6*multi] + volume[7*multi] + volume[8*multi] + volume[9*multi] + volume[10*multi]) / 10;

VolRelativeAverage.SetDefaultColor(Color.YELLOW);