thinking about it a bit further, my commsec site quotes market depth probably gives as good indication of the number of buyers and sellers in the market by applying that on a proportional basis to my CMC market platform.
I also have been using my commsec site market depth as an indicator of "sentiment", as I am more familiar with that. I suppose I should be using the sentiment indicator on my CMC markets platform as there could be a difference being a separate market ??
I have noticed a couple of big cap stocks do not have quite the same number of participants on the open market as one would assume - PMV being one. so I might keep away from that in the CFD scene.
the brain keeps spitting out new questions. I am going back to the library to re-read a few books on CFDS that I browsed through a 3 or 4 months ago, and seem to forgotten most of what I read.