@chrism68 Have you ever bought at the ask? Was that a buy or a...

@chrism68
Have you ever bought at the ask? Was that a buy or a sell?
Have you ever sold to the bidder? Was that a sell or a buy?
That depends on one’s own perspective I guess but the market shows them as buy & sell.

In the snap shot you can see the difference.
If a trade or number of trades are higher than the previous one/s then it is obvious that someone has met the ask price.
The total of those trades are shown.
The opposite is true for a down trade.
In the snapshot you can see the green uptick & the red down tick
At the close of the day the numbers are tallied up & the up ticks are subtracted from the down ticks.


Why do I look at this stuff?

I think that it shows / confirms what the analysis of the candles & indicators are showing at that time.
It can give an insight into what was happening inside the make up of the day / weeks candle.
It can also (in hindsight) show the possible short covering or opening new short positions which would both be part of the days buy vol.
If you compare the result to the candle / Bar in whatever time frame you are interested in, I think that that shows if there is selling pressure or buying pressure.
That is useful to know particularly if approaching resistance, support or other TA inspired projected targets such as a Fib level or trend channel lines etc. & you are trading.

Look at the 4th Jan.
We had a gap open. Significantly higher vol. which was net buying, (13.8% of the days vol)
We reached resistance, the close was at the lows & scrolling through the days trades there was mainly selling in the afternoon & the sp closed at the lows.
The stochastics were lower than the prev day.

Next day the 5^th Jan a similar thing happened.
High vol, & low net buying but only 3% of the days vol.
There was the largest number of shorts for several weeks on the 5th. We will know tomorrow if they were new positions or just a day trade.
The sp reached prev projected resistance areas.
The stochastics continued to decline.
So imo that indicates selling pressure.
These are all warning signs.

I don’t trade anymore but if I was then the sp was giving fair warning that not everyone was on the same page.

Add up the weekly numbers & apply the same reasoning to see if that applies to the weekly TA.
Last weeks action on the weekly took us up to an expected resistance & looks great but the underlying numbers show that out of the 54m odd shares traded only 3% was net buying.
Making allowances for the Xmas & NY breaks that is not much buying but by the same token the support is there and they have not yet been able to push the sp down much.
Fridays vol was net buying however so I am presuming that we will see another attempt to push higher. That will take some effort & probably an announcement but that resistance will go soon imo.

Everything that is negative atm is only negative in the sense that it is short term & is a normal function of the market which traders / pros probably cause & cake advantage of.
I

These are exciting times for us all & I would not be out for any reason atm.