 All right, should be going. Okay, welcome everybody to the webinar. So this is a series we've been doing with Gary Norden. Very happy to be doing this with a high-end professional trader on the dome. It's a series regarding mastering the dome here. This time, real-time versus rabbit holes can't wait to understand exactly what he means by this. A little bit of information on Gary. Gary Norden has the Norden method. He's been a professional trader for over 30 years, including several years in the trading pits of life and as a senior trader at some of the world's largest investment banks. He's a co-owner of the NN squared capital and creator of the Norden method, a unique style of order flow trading. Gary is the author of An End to the Bowl and technical analysis exposed why most technical analysis traders fail. So some really interesting conversations we've had during this series. It's in a playlist. I'll share it with everybody if you're interested to take a look. And I'll also share Gary's website here. He's got a couple NordenMethod.com as well as GaryNordan.com. We'll go through the disclosures and then turn it over to Gary. General disclosure, all book map limited materials, information and presentations are for educational purposes only and should not be considered specific investment advice nor recommendations. The risk disclosure, trading futures, equities and digital currencies involve substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. So Gary, if you've got your screen sharing, then I can broadcast it and get it going over here in YouTube as well. All right. Got me? I think so. Yep, perfect. Excellent. Thanks, Bruce. Thanks everybody for attending. This is a record for me, the fourth in a series of webinars. I've never been invited back for four in a row. So thanks, Bruce. That's a record for me. Real time versus rabbit hole, a little bit of alliteration there that my English teacher will be happy to. I do remember that. And so I thought, in some ways, this is a summary of what we've talked about with the DOM, but I'm also going to introduce a couple of new concepts as well. And you also know that my helpers actually redone my slides so they look a little bit nicer as well today. My disclaimer as well, which I'll leave out for a couple of seconds if you're watching this on YouTube, feel free to pause this afterwards. So I've discussed how the DOM, the history of it, what it is, why it's so powerful and it comes back to the idea and the basis that the DOM and time themselves are real-time tools. That's the power and the benefit they have. That's in part why DOM traders have edge over chart traders. We're trading real-time, they're trading the past. And once you understand that and that you understand what various different bits of edge that provides, that's what we try to then to package that up and to come up with strategies to develop a method of picking off those traders. So the DOM, as I mentioned before, was originally based on input from professionals who were real-time traders. And most professional traders will value real-time information more highly than past information. And we spoke about that a lot more in the last webinar, just a couple of weeks ago. And certainly a key difference between most retail traders and pros. So most retail traders, as I say, using charts which are basically looking in the past, we were only interested in the moment, in the moment now in real-time. After all, we are trading real-time, we're not trading the past. So if we think about that, we are trading in real-time liquidity. What the liquidity is right now, we are trading against the real-time trades, what's happening right now with the real-time context. Whenever we trade, that's what we're doing. We're trading in the now, right? We always do that. It's just the fact that many traders are not basing their trades on what's happening now, they're basing their trades on the past. The DOM, as I say, the thing to get around it, this is a powerful real-time tool. So coming back to this real-time context could include many things. It could include, are there mainly smaller or larger traders trading right now? Is there any news, any data just hit? Remembering that the chart doesn't have that in it, right? So if you're trading off of a chart, you're not trading off, the people that traded in the past if some new information hit, whether that's earnings for a company, whether that's macro data, whether that's the collapse of a bank or whatever, all the information you've looked at in that chart, all the highs and lows and anything you might wanna draw from that chart. The people that traded that were not aware of that data at the time of that information. So realistically, that information is, to me, is just completely invalidized, so I don't use charts in that way. So any news data just hit, we're trading real-time, okay? We're trading in the real-time context. What type of action are we currently trading? What's the current volatility, the current liquidity? All of these things and more will influence how I trade at this moment. What's not gonna influence me is what happened a week ago or an hour or 10 days ago or a month ago or something like that because different context. So what it means is, as a real-time trader, using a real-time tool, which is what, coming back, what the DOM is, I'm adjusting my trading to suit the real-time and that's the key component of not just an order method but anybody that is a real-time trader, any professional style, real-time order-throw trader. You are constantly adjusting your trading to suit the real-time. This is really important that you're able to do that as well because if you're trading real-time, then in half an hour's time, the context might be slightly different to now, the liquidity might have changed and the people playing might have changed. Those of you that are trading RTH in the US will know that the open is different from lunchtime, which is different from the close. So the context is constantly changing. I pointed out last time how the chart doesn't show you this, right? The chart doesn't show you the context. It doesn't really show you anything apart from some very, very basic data. So what we're trying to do as a real-time trader is to trade the right way for the current conditions and like I say, a chart can't tell you this. A traditional price chart, price versus time type chart cannot show you this information, cannot help you to trade in this way. This is the power of the DOM. The DOM is the real-time tool that helps us to do this. It's why we help to create it in that way. So again, a lot of what I'm trying to explain is what the benefits and why trading in real-time gives you advantages. The next stage of that is to work out it's precisely, specifically what those advantages are and then try to formulate a strategy structure and techniques around those advantages. And I've highlighted something during the last few weeks. So you should be able to develop some of your own out there. Rabbit holes. So I'm just gonna bring up a couple of things that I think are more like rabbit holes. So real-time is power. Rabbit holes will just take time away from you. You'll spend so much time going down these rabbit holes. Some of them may lead somewhere. Some of them are gonna be blind allies and I just think often it's just a waste of time. And I'm talking about this predominantly in the context of day traders, intraday traders, which if you're a futures trader that's what really you should be. In my opinion, futures are not really a product to be used for holding positions for weeks or months unless you're using them for hedging purposes. They're a great day trading tool. So I'm talking about this mainly from the perspective of being a day trader, particularly a short-term day trader, doesn't mean that I think that, for example, charts are something that will help you in your position trading because I also think they're gonna hurt you in your position trade. So there's a few rabbit holes that I think and people end up going down and end up just, you can get caught up in this for years. I've known people that have been down these rabbit holes for years. So as I just said, traditional price charts don't show much of the information, I just said liquidity, context, all those sorts of things. It's just a bunch of just very simplistic past data. And again, if you weren't here for the last webinar, check it out, I gave you an example of even candlestick charts, are really poor at representing how the market traded and how the market traded is really important. It's just as important as where it traded. In my book, Technical Analysis Exposure, I'm trying to highlight some of the flaws of technical analysis and there are many flaws enough to fill 200 plus page book, plus more probably. I gave an example of understanding context why it's important and that comes into another area which is called alternative histories. And the example I gave was the 2000 and I think it was two, I think it was the 2002 Winter Olympics, quite famous if you're Australian. There was a speed skating race that was won by an Australian, Stephen Bradbury, become legendary, okay, Stephen Bradbury, many of you may know it, not if you want to YouTube it, find out. So Stephen Bradbury won the gold medal at the 2000, I think it was 2002, the Winter Olympics. Now, if you looked at the results and you just looked at the results of that race, you saw that Stephen Bradbury came one and I can't remember who was two, three, four, five, six. And if you were asked someone, okay, what's this race is gonna be, rerun, what's the probabilities, who's the best race of all that, if you just look at the result, you're gonna see that Stephen Bradbury won, you're gonna probably think that he's the best skater and that if this race was rerun, he's the most likely to win again. After all, he's won the first one. That's kind of like what a chart shows you. It just shows you what happened, the end result. This was the high, this was the low, this is what happened. It didn't tell you how it happened. Now, the thing about the 2002 Winter Olympics speed skating that Stephen Bradbury won was that up until the last lap, he was at the back, he was way last, okay? And what happened was all the guys in front of him tripped over each other and they all fell over and he literally just skated around the back on one. And the point that I try to make is in the book and here and now is that if we had two people and we were asking them to make a price on it, okay, to bet on either bet on that race or make a price as a bookmaker, one had watched the race and one just saw the result. The one that watched, the person that watched the race is gonna make a much better judgment than the person that just sees the result. The person that sees the result thinks Stephen Bradbury is the best skater in that thing in that race and if it was run again would probably make him favor and blah, blah, blah. The person that watched it would say, well, hold on, he was way last, right? And they lost the likelihood of all of the other competitors taking each other out in the race, it's very unlikely. So the other person who watched the race is gonna make a very different decision and make a different price if he's a bookmaker and place a different bet if he's a gambler. That's the difference between looking at a price chart and trading on a DOM. When you trade on the DOM, you are seeing what's really happening, how it happened and again, go back to that last webinar that I did about charts and you'll see a little bit more what I mean. So this is why I think they're a rabbit hole. You can spend years learning about charts, supposedly how to read them, all the different patterns, all the different trends, all the different things you can do, this becomes a rabbit hole and when one doesn't work, you'll get sent to another one, to another one, to another one, to another one and there are as many different tools to use on a chart as almost stars in the sky. This is another one every week. But it's a rabbit hole because the whole premise behind it is incorrect and particularly if you are a day trader, which is again what I'm focusing on here, it's not going to show you the information that you need. So that's why I say this is a rabbit hole. You're gonna go off in different directions when one fails, someone's gonna say, oh, you use a five minute chart and now you should use a 10 minute chart and then when that doesn't work, oh, now you should use a one and you could end up doing this at infinite, right? It really can and I've met many people that have, that are decades into their TA trading, their chart trading and they still haven't figured out exactly which combination of which things they should use. You're never gonna find it and there's research in the book I've shown that you're never gonna find out for the vast majority of people. So I classify that as a rabbit hole. It's not real time, what's it based on is not going to help you. Volume indicators, this is another area where day traders go into very, very popular. I classify volume indicators as a rabbit hole as well for the similar reasons that there are a number of different ones, some of them have branches off of them. So you might have something like market profile which was developed which became very popular then the person that invented market profile said, hey, what's up, hey, you know what? There's a lot of flaws with this, I'm creating a new one and then there's a new version of it and then another new version and the funny thing is most people probably still use the first version even though the person that created it said it's flawed. It's still very popular. Again, they're not in the now, they're usually using old data, they assume that old data is relevant. I've said before that I don't think that they are forms of order flow trading. To me it's just another form of technical analysis, right? Why? Because it's using past data. It's not trading in the now, they're not real time. So I would classify them again as a rabbit hole. There's somewhere you can go and you'll end up in splintering off in different ways and you could come up five or 10 years later and be none the wiser about what's really happening in your market. Again, bring it back to the DOM. You don't really need a DOM to trade on these methods. Okay, and to me they're very retail style of trading. You're just not gonna get hedge funds or pro traders really using that kind of stuff. So bringing it back, the DOM's powerful because it's trading real time, these things are not, you don't need a DOM for them and in my opinion they become rabbit holes because you can go off in so many different ways but ultimately they're not showing you as a day trader the information that you really need to know which is the real time information. That's only possible on the DOM. Now, icebergs. Icebergs is an interesting one because you could say to me now, well, I actually would have probably agree with you, right? That icebergs are a real time phenomena. So would we be trading icebergs, right? Is that something? And you know, with the bookmap pro I think with the rhythmic data you can spot these. So icebergs, should we be trading them? It's as this is real time and this is where we get into, you know, a bit more I suppose of my view versus others. Now, I'm old enough to remember when they were first introduced. So when the European London market in particular was the biggest when screen-based iceberg orders weren't there initially. And I can actually remember the first time someone mentioned in a little trading room that I was at back in the day at Goldenberg Hamer that they've seen this odd order. And then, you know, like within a day or two, you know, we got back because we weren't using EasyScreen. We were using TT. So it got back to us that there was this new order type, an EasyScreen, which many of you may not have known now but that was one of the initial, one of the very first platforms in London. EasyScreen was the first platform to my recollection that actually created this. They created this for some of their clients who were more brokers than traders. Clearly it's more for use for a broker than certainly back then as well. So it created a lot of interest when it first happened. It was like, whoa, there's this new type of order. They called it an iceberg order and obviously, you know, you understand why. And this has been 2000, the year 2000. So, you know, half of you probably won't even born then, I'm guessing. So, you know, we all needed to adapt, right? But initially, their use was quite vanilla. Okay, what I mean by vanilla was when you saw an iceberg buy order, the trader wanted to buy them, right? That was very vanilla. And really the decision for those that traded, now I was trading footsie back then. So it didn't, it wasn't an issue in footsie. There's more of an issue in contracts like boons. There were a lot of boon traders and larger contracts bonds along the bond curve. Really the only issue the traders were faced at that time was, you know, what happens? Is this buyer big enough that he's gonna drive the market higher or when he gets filled, is it just gonna go, you know, collapse under him? So very vanilla back in the day and, you know, traders had to adapt to the fact that this is iceberg orders. And the order flow trading style ex-local type traders, you know, adapted quickly. Everybody had their own ways of trading it. But over the years, the way the icebergs are used has changed. It's no longer, they are no longer just vanilla style of order placement. What I mean by that is, when someone places an iceberg order to buy, they may be a buyer, they may be a seller. Right, and what's harder now, if you're asking why would they put an iceberg buyer or if they're a seller, because they're trying to, you know, show people that there's a strong buyer and hoping that above that they've got some set orders they're hoping to get to lose some as well on the offer side. And they'll happily take the others on the bid, but they could be a seller. A lot of that will depend on the market conditions, on the sentiment at that time, on the liquidity at that time, all those things. When you're a large trader or execution broker, these are all the things you consider when you're trying to work out what's the best way of executing a big order. But so coming back to it, to judge the end goal of that trader now, are they actually buying or are they actually trying to sell here? It can become far more difficult now, and it was back in the day. And, you know, I classify them as a known unknown. I know it's there, but I don't know what he's doing. So I will treat that accordingly as I trade. So even though they are real time, icebergs are obviously a real time order phenomena, they can be part of a larger and longer operation. You know, it's unlikely that it's just, you know, someone wants to just buy a thousand lots now and they're split it into 10 lots of 100. It's more complex than that. It can be a part of a longer, larger order, can be related as well to other things that are going on in other markets. So I think they're becoming a bit more of a rabbit hole in that way that there's so many different things that they could be doing now, that it's hard as a trader to really know what's happening and therefore to formulate a strategy to trade. In the old days, it was very vanilla. It was there, if they were a buyer, they were a buyer, you know, nobody, it was very naive, I suppose, in those days, the people that initially used them. And so as a trader, as a market maker style trader, it was quite easy to figure out how to trade around them or, you know, how anybody in our style would, but now it's a lot more complex. As I say, I call them a known unknown and therefore I believe like trying to trade them is a bit like a rabbit hole. You, to try to figure this out now is very, is a lot more complex. I have a saying I've mentioned this a few times in webinars over the last few years. If you think you can understand what a big player is doing, either you are wrong or he is rubbish, you know, and if you're wrong, obviously, you're not going to do very well. And if he's rubbish, there's no point in trying to figure out what he's doing or copying him, right? So I think this is, you know, this is something that I kind of lived by as a day trader in my day trading life, okay? Is this philosophy, which is why my style is not about trying to identify what big guys are doing. Because I just think that's just a too hard a game. And I'll say that as someone that's been there and done that, you know, to become a big trader, a good big trader, you have to find so many different ways of being able to execute your business. So I think it's, if sitting from the outside here, I don't think I can make that judgment, you know? And again, I've said this before, I know what I know and I know what I don't know. And I'm quite happy to put my hand up and say, I don't know what he's doing. So I'm not going to try and guess because that's what it will be. Something I also want to talk about in terms of rabbit holes, again, how this won't help your trading, is it? You know, in particular as a day trader, because again, there's better ways of day trading than going down these rabbit holes. As I say, that's what the dom's all about. It's this real time tool, this powerful tool. Technical analysis and many of the other rabbit holes are usually pipes of closed loops. Now, a closed loop is a style of decision making which is very hard to learn from. It's actually almost impossible and perhaps it is impossible. So Matthew Syed, who's written about them in one of his books, he explains as a closed loop process the use of leeches in medicine in the past. So the way it would work is that obviously, doctors just thought that leeches worked. If you had a particular illness, they put a leech on you. If you recovered, it was because of the leech, right? And if you died, well, they would say, oh, well, you were too ill even for the leeches. Once you have a view of something and someone's told you this works, it's very hard to test the hypothesis. And in fact, it's impossible to learn, which is why medicine didn't go forward in some ways until they became more scientific. And that kind of learning you're not gonna learn from. I feel that a lot of the rabbit hole styles of trading, and particularly in our technical analysis, is definitely a form of closed loop. What I mean by that is that I learned the rules of what a head and shoulders pattern is, or any of the patterns or trend lines, okay? I trade it based off the rules, okay? If I make money, it's like, yeah, yeah, the rules work. And if I lose money, the rules don't change, right? A head and shoulders pattern is formed in a certain way. So if I lose money on that head and shoulders pattern, which I will, because according to the studies that I quote in technical analysis exposed by the New York Federal Reserve, head and shoulders pattern has a success rate of about 50%, which is different from what the technical analysts will tell you, but that's what it was shown in independent and very thorough studies. So 50%, so one in every two is not gonna work. So what happens with the one that doesn't work? Oh, it just didn't work. You know, well, that's not different from the elites philosophy. How do I improve on that? How do I make sure that next time I trade this better? And you can't really, the only thing you're gonna do is probably position size less because you've just lost money in your account. So many volume indicator stars as well, if you're using those are forms of closed loop. They're not really gonna allow you to respond to the feedback and find a way to improve in the future. So to improve as a trader, you need to find or we should use open loop systems. Open loop systems are ones where we can constantly monitor and respond to feedback. You make mistakes, we learn, we adapt, we continually adapt. And real-time trading styles have a much better chance, in my opinion, of offering us an open loop method. And again, this feedback to the DOM, which is what we're talking about, the, you know, being able to master the DOM because the DOM is a real-time platform, it's a real-time tool. So real-time trading offers us the opportunity to create open loop methods because you're studying the current liquidity and adapting accordingly or whatever it is you're looking at if you're trading through the liquidity or whatever it is that you're looking at in your real-time trading style, using the DOM, you are able to make adjustments, constantly make adjustments. You don't just sit there and go, this is always right, I'm always gonna do this or whatever, you're constantly adjusting. That's what real-time trading methods should be doing. So with an order method, I teach and show a number of open loop methods during the process of trading. You know, we have more than one, and one of them is an OODA loop style that we have. So there's actually the process of an order method in a way is an OODA loop. I haven't got the slide on OODA loop now, if you wanna look up OODA loop, you can have a look at it. It's basically it was designed by a fighter pilot. You know, it's seen and believed to be the fastest and the best way of making real-time decisions and making good decisions. And it's basically about adapting, seeing the information and adapting to it. That's what I believe real-time trading should be about. You know, in your constantly adapting and the best trader are the ones that adapt the quickest and the best. So open loop, real-time trading styles give you that opportunity. Now it's up to us as traders to seize that opportunity. I'll just go back a sec. It's up to us as real-time traders to seize that opportunity, right? We have to design a trading style technique that gives us the opportunity to respond to feedback. Okay, but that's what I want. And as a day trader, I think that's what you need. And so many trading styles, particularly day trading styles, if they don't give you that opportunity to reflect, learn and create these loops, these open loops of learning analysis, feedback analysis, if they don't give you that opportunity, you're missing a lot of the benefits of what real-time trading can do. So DOM is the tool, time and sales. And what may be, I think, a potentially future webinar that you might do about trade analytics as well, all of these things come into helping us design and then implement open loops so we can constantly learn. That's the power of real-time trading. As I said, OODA loop, if you understand that and the power of it, you'll try to incorporate that in your trading. Now, I actually didn't know what an OODA loop was when I originally designed my trading style. It was actually a student of mine who is ex-military who, when I taught him, said to me, this whole process you're teaching is an OODA loop style. And that's when I went and researched OODA loop and was obviously very pleased to find out that the system, which I knew was an open loop style system, where I knew that I was responding to feedback, didn't realize it was an OODA loop. But obviously I was really happy with the fact that that's what I came up with now. I'm not saying it just appeared to me in a dream one day. These things took decades to craft and to learn and to keep learning. And that's what happens is I suppose over time, you just evolve and develop new ways of improving certain things and you end up with that. So, open loops, very powerful. Now, a couple of other things that often come across as controversial, and I don't know why. And when I say this, some people get angry or upset or whatever, but this shouldn't be controversial. But things to bear in mind when you're trading futures. And I'm talking about futures, I'm not looking at other contracts, but it would also apply to some other contracts too, other products. Futures are a derivative. I think when I hear some people talk about them, I think they forget that's a derivative. They think the futures markets are driving everything, right? So they were, oh yeah, it's all driven by futures. So if there's people bidding up the futures market, the ES right now, oh, there's a buyer of ES. They do that as if they mean that the ES is driving the whole stock market. Remember, there are other derivatives and the one you're trading may not be the largest. So if you are trading ES, you should be aware, as I'm sure everybody is, that there's also SPX, SPY, there's a whole bunch of different ETFs actually. You've got the underlying stock market as well and the liquidity that that provides. And it doesn't really matter what futures are doing. If right now, everybody's dumping everything else, dumping stocks, dumping SPX, dumping SPY or whatever, going down, right? And I hear people talk about futures and some of these other styles of analyzing the volume of your futures contract, for example, it kind of ignores the fact that this futures contract is just one of a number of derivatives in a much wider bigger market. But that means there must be other influences on the price of your product. Okay, the ES futures are not just going to be influenced by the liquidity demand and supply and the past prices and whatever of the ES futures. They're clearly going to be influenced by what's happening elsewhere as well. And to me, that means that would lead me to focus on styles where I'm only looking at the current liquidity because really I've got no idea what's going to influence this contract in half an hour's time or an hour's time. And I've spoken about that before about the idea of in the now is more powerful. I'm just introducing now another reason why I think trading in the now real time is the right way of doing it in a market like a futures market where there are other influences too. If you're using a style that suggests that the volume profile or whatever it is, the volume thing that you're using for the futures is going to determine where it's going, I would say that it is likely that's misguided, right? There are other markets and it's bigger than ours. And also bear in mind as well that the vast majority of ES trading is intraday trading. It's not like in-client people buying and selling ES because they think the stocks are going up and down. Now if you look at, as I'm sure you all know, the change in open interest versus the volume that trades, it will tell you a very small part of what trades every day is actually in-client business. Whereas there's probably more in-client business in those other markets, but obviously particularly in the stock market, there's the underlying contract but also in some of the ETFs as well. So I think that information as well pushes me to believe I'm better off trading this just for the now, just in real time. And again, that's going to lead me back to the DOM because it's the real time tool and I just need to figure out, I just need to know what's trading now, what the liquidity is now, what the price is now and all those sorts of things. Again, just want to talk, I'm not really sure why I bought this into this particular webinar, but as I said, so this is not really a rabbit hole, but just a missed opportunity. I want to explain what happened and why I think there was a missed opportunity for retail traders. Again, this is just based on the fact that I'm an old guy, so I was around at this time. So if you go back to the days where there were trading pits, retail traders sitting at home, they paid very high commissions, right? You would pay $75 plus to trade futures back in those days. If you look at the process that you had to follow to trade, you had to phone your order to your broker who then would phone down to the floor. Guy in the booth on the floor would sign to the guy in the pit, who would fill the order, would sign back to the guy in the booth, who would get back on the phone to the guy in the office, who would get back on the phone to you as a client. That's the whole process. That's why it was expensive and as I say $75 would have been a lot more than that, perhaps in the 80s. It's expensive. It took a long, it took time. I mean, even if that was done very quickly with the phones, it's still gonna be probably a couple of minutes all done. The retail traders back then, I understand had no choice to chase longer term trades with bigger targets. You couldn't trade the ES or a market for one tick, two ticks. You had to trade it for 10, 15, 26. You had to carry your orders for longer. The idea of trading in and out quickly in market maker style, real-time trading styles just was not available to you. If you wanted to do that, you had to go down to the floor. So understand that if you're a retail trader back then, and this is where all the technical analysis books, most of them are written around about that, sort of 70s, 80s. And so this is where it all became popular and all that sort of stuff became popular. And I can't understand how people were drawn towards that. I'm not saying it was right to trade that way, but understand that. But when the markets transitioned to electronic trading, that was an opportunity for retail traders to change, to be changed to a more professional approach. Fees came down dramatically, right? And so now everybody's paying nowhere near that. Obviously that's 75. So the fees are now well below one tick, if you're trading ES or for most contracts, right? The amount you're paying is way below one tick. You now have access to the DOM. The DOM is essentially, it's like being in the pit. It gives you that ability to make the price. It gives you the ability to trade in and out as quickly as anybody can really with manually anyway. We're not talking about HFTs here. So you can use a tool that the pros have. It's in many ways, it's just like being in the pit. You can make the price on a DOM. It gives you the ability to trade real time, just like professional traders. But sadly retail traders, and this is not necessarily just therefore, it's also because of the people that were educating them, weren't professional traders so they don't know about these methods. They're just the usual technical analysts. So unfortunately retail traders ended up trading the same way. They're still trying to hold trades for half a day or still using predictive techniques. They're trying to predict where this market's gonna be in half an hour. Still holding trades too long. They're still in the same rabbit holes as before. If I can just figure out which combination of moving average or which timeframe chart and just figure out which combination will work, you can be doing that for years. They've been unable to grasp the power of the DOM, what it means to trading, what the power of real time trading is. So the vast majority of retail traders just stay using price charts and stay down the rabbit holes. Just again, added this in, it's a question that we've had before. It's a question I get asked a lot every time you talk about trading higher volume styles, higher frequency people say, oh, but the commissions will hurt you. Retail traders and educators are dead scared of higher frequency trading styles, right? And I love this, I just love it. Anytime anybody says this to me and going forward, anytime anybody says that to you about our commissions will hurt you if you're a high frequency trader. Okay, I'm gonna say this right now and this is gonna piss a lot of people off. They're not a professional trader. I can tell you right now it's not a professional trader. Every professional trader I know trades in at some sort of high volumes, high frequencies. Most of the most successful traders, hedge funds, we all know that they're trading these sorts of styles. They seek out, there's a lot of benefits to high frequency styles. I've written some sub-stack articles about them, about some of the power of frequency. So if you wanna go more into that, have a look at my sub-stack. It's free by the way. All of the people that pay the highest commissions out there will be the best traders. The more you trade, the lower your commissions will go as well, and then you can move perhaps in futures markets to seek this if you're trading on the Merck products. And actually we build that into our projections of profitability. I know the more I trade, the lower my commissions will go, which actually increases my profitability as well. So it's actually featured as part of your sort of business plan of trying to get more, that's one of the reasons why we love high frequency. Our volumes drop dramatically by doing that dramatically. And if you know what the volume, the prices, if you can get to the point of leasing a seat, it becomes another level of profitability again. So fear of commissions is just one reason why retail traders will stay away from these high-frequency real-time trading styles. But all the pit traders on the floor, if you think about them, the locals on the floor, they were trading far more frequently than the retail traders at home. Which ones were the most profitable? Did they worry about their commissions? No, that was just, and they paid a lease on the floor, could be anything, and that was a number that went up and down. My first options pit seat lease on life was 300 pounds a month, I think within maybe 12 months it was costing 2,000 to 3,000 a month. And that's just variation based on the fact that a lot of Americans decided to come to London and that pushed up the price of seat leases. Again, a retail trader would look at that and go, oh, I'm never gonna pay that, I'll never make money. They're missing the point of where the edge is. The edge was on the floor, so you would pay that amount of money to be there to get that edge. And yeah, trading high-frequency styles, you don't worry about commissions, I've said this before, but if you look at most professional traders, their best months would also probably, almost certainly be the months they have the highest commissions. You trade hard when you're trading well and the market conditions are good and you scale your trading back when things are quiet or you're not trading well. That's how your trading career should be. So by definition, in that sense, your highest commission months are also your best P&L months. So when I hear anybody say, oh, commissions are gonna kill you, the first thing I think of is they've never traded as a professional. They don't understand the game. So as a summary of this session, a little bit of recap and a couple of new ideas, hopefully I've put in this at this time, the DOM is a powerful real-time tool. That's the key thing to learn about it, right? So take the time to learn what it shows, what it is, why it's powerful. Learn about its advantages over price charts and I've discussed a number of them in the four webinars that we've done now. And switching to real-time trading, trading in the now, what's happening now, it's a massive change for most retail traders but it will be a professional change. If you can do it and you can understand that style and I've given a lot of clues and hints and ideas about the sort of information that you can use if you can craft it and learn and think about it in that way, it's a big change. But I think it's a change that I found when I've taught people, they kind of embrace it. When you forget about trying to think where's this thing gonna be in half an hour's time and you just trade right now, what's it gonna be? Right now, what can I do? It can actually be quite liberating. It's easier to learn and improve if you're using an open loop style of trading. One way you're constantly responding to feedback and any decent real-time trading style should be doing that. So again, a style using a DOM where you're trading in and out currently, the current market in quite quick fashion, you should try to create and be able to create an open loop system where you're constantly responding to feedback. And again, what I'm also trying to hopefully do is, and again, this isn't a context of day traders, short-term day traders, try to recognize and get out of rabbit holes. You can be down them for a long, long time. So that's Bruce. All right, thank you, Gary. There's some questions coming in, so let me get to that. Okay, so, yeah, KA is asking about, that you mentioned earlier about the different indexes and what's affecting price. KA is wondering about options and correlations. Is this something that should be watched? Options on futures. Yeah, good question, right? Because this is becoming, I think, a new rabbit hole in a way, the impact of options. Options, yeah, the reason why this can become a rabbit hole is you're going to watch options on ES, options on SPX, options on SPY, options on all of them. There are accounts out there that put them all together. You can see over all what they're doing. I think options activity is a factor in the markets. I will also say, though, that I think some of the analysis of options flow is incorrect. Some of the assumptions that some of the big options accounts say, I think a little bit also can be misleading and incorrect, so I'd be careful. But monitoring what's happening, it's, I think, part of the information flow that you'll bring in. There will be times where it'll be very useful for you. There will be times where it may not be and that's where it becomes difficult, but like I suppose, isn't it? It's like, I know it's there. I don't know exactly at this moment how it's going to help me or how I'm going to trade it, but it's interesting information. Like I said, I think there's a little of a rabbit hole opening up on this, on some of the whole gamma situation, but yeah, I would still watch it for sure. It's going to be an input. Okay, let's see here. So if you trade the ES and watch the NQ as a correlated market, or do you prefer to watch underlying stock that makes up the index, I guess, maybe something like Apple or Microsoft? Yeah, you should be watching all of them, all of it. So yeah, you'd be watching the key stocks. You will be watching anything that you think is relevant to the price of the contract you're trading. That's what I always tell people, and that changes as well. There can be things that affect your market a lot today, but don't affect it too much tomorrow. Sometimes it's because there's a theme happening, maybe something happening in banking stocks. For example, like a couple of weeks ago, that was affecting sentiment across all markets. So even if you were trading NQ, when the banks were having their little thing, all markets went. So being aware of what's affecting the price of your contract, but just understanding that what you're looking at inside your market in the volume and the prices, that's not the whole picture. There's obviously other things happening. So being aware of that and monitoring it is going to help you. Okay. So a question on that, Gary. So when you're monitoring something like that, are you watching also just in real time? Yep. Okay. So you would be looking at multiple domes basically at that point. Yeah, how you look at them, I think it would depend on the person. I'm not a big fan of looking at lots of domes. You know, you have other features on book map like market pulse that you can watch other markets on things like that. There are other products as well for looking at correlations. And yeah, some platforms have quote boards on. So everybody has a different way. And that's about what does your eye respond to. That's something I talk to my students about that when we're setting up our platform, everyone's slightly different. So we might look at them in different ways. But the point is you should be looking at the sort of information. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, interesting point about the market pulse tool in book map, it's very much like a dome in the sense that it's real time. And it pings, it will show you only the current value and then it is forgotten or it is left behind and just continues to show you just the real time. And yeah, anyway, that's one of the things about the market pulse tool that allows you to correlate and track many different things at the same time. Let's see here, a few more questions. Aziz has been trading the order book dome, but sees a lot of opportunity to enter. So I fall into overtrading. How can I overcome that basically? Yeah, overtrading is something that is possible. And I'd say I think that the two things to consider are do you have, what's your analysis and reevaluation process? It needs to be instant. It needs to be an open loop style system so that every time you trade or responding to the feedback, every trade is feedback. And so are you able to respond to it? So overtrading is usually a sign that you're not responding to feedback. Now, so what is your process for responding to feedback? Do you know what feedback you should be responding to? Again, that should all be part of your strategy is what information is gonna tell me that I'm doing something wrong or right and it's not just P and L as well. So one of the wrong things to think about is this trade made money, it was good, this trade lost money, it was bad. It's not always as simple as that. So you need to understand what information, you know, to break down your style specifically, what are you trying to achieve? What does a good trade look like? What might be wrong when you have a poor trade and overtrading basically means you're making lots of trades that are not making money, right? That's overtrading. If you're trading a lot and making money, that's not overtrading, you know? So overtrading, trading a lot, not making money, you have a breakdown in your process of re-evaluation in your open loop. So do you have an open loop? Do you know what information you should be looking for? Do you know what information is gonna tell you that there's something was wrong with that trade and what it is and how you need to correct it? All these things, you know, I'm very specific about all of these little points. And, you know, my students will tell you like if they send in something and there's a, you know, I can spot like what they're missing and it's such a, you know, an easy spot. I don't like it. I get very angry. I'm very specific about all these things because that's what you have to be. You know, we're competing against, you know, some very smart people. So it's a, you know, often a breakdown there. So go back and look at your process. Like I say, that's probably the main thing. And of course, just if you have a number of losers and you can't figure out what the problem is, then stop. You know, otherwise it becomes an addiction. It's like gambling, isn't it? It's like the people that sit under the betting shops all day long, you know, no professional gambler is making good money. He's standing in a betting shop all day just betting on every horse race. That's all the guys, the losers are doing that. So you've got to be very specific and you've got to know what you're picking off, why you're picking off. And you've also just got to say to yourself, I've had extra number of trades in a row. I can't figure out why they've gone wrong. I can't figure out what's not happening here. I stop. That has to be part of your process as well. Know what, you know, know what the trading isn't, know what, you know, and be able to stop. So there are two things but the number one is what you want to get to, right? That's where the first thing I was talking about, that's where you want to get to, that you understand specifically what that process is. What information, I think it's about a lot of traders go wrong. They don't know specifically what information they need to tell them and to correct if it goes wrong or bad, you know? All right, what does a good trade look like? What does a good trade look like when you're looking at the data on it? Do you know specifically what it looks like? Do you know specifically the difference between a good and a bad trade? Once you get to those points, you can start to adapt and that's when you can create your feedback loop. So yeah, I have a question on that, Gary. So open loop, I mean, even with the ODA method, I mean, this is heavily based off of experience. So how do you kind of train yourself in an open loop? So yeah, so you have to know specifically what it is you are doing. Like what am I picking off here? What does a good trade look like? What might be the problems? Now, you know, for, I give my students a checklist, a post-fill checklist, and it will have a number of things on it. And you know, it's the first time it might take you a few seconds to go through, which is too long, but ultimately it becomes second nature. But you know, that's one of the loop processes. But what it is, is there are some specific key things that need to happen when we trade. And so, you know, what I try to arm my students with what I'm doing is I know specifically what those things are. Now, if a trade goes wrong and I lose money, it's probably one of those things. Now, there's a few of them. It's not like there's one or two. There's a few of them on that list, right? So often you can discount maybe, you know, half of them straight away and go, and I definitely wasn't those ones. So that leaves you with two or three. And so what I say to my students is right, now you've got to correct, and you might choose one of them to correct the next time around. And if that one doesn't work, you'll correct the next one. That's why I always say to my students, if you have three or four losers in a row, you should stop. Because by that point, you should have been able to get through and correct it. Now you're not reading something properly. Now there's a mistake happening. And if at that point, you should stop. So it comes down to knowing exactly what you're trying to do. Exactly what, you know, I say, what is a good trade look? Like what are the things that could hurt me? What are the things that could mean that I'm doing badly? And, you know, I'll give you another open loop style. And this is, you know, I, when I first started playing golf, I learned to play golf in a closed loop style. So what does that mean? It's just like, or firstly, I would just, just me and a mate, just, you know, swinging a golf club at a driving range, right? And then eventually getting somewhere, you eventually you hit a ball. But I had no reason, I had no understanding how or why I did it, but after like, you know, eight months of hitting thousands of balls at a driving range, I started to hit the ball in the air. Great. Then I went on to a golf course. And of course, after a couple of months, you know, everything broke down, right? So then you go, initially I went to a golf pro and he corrected the things that was wrong with my swing. All right, which there may have been a lot of them, but he corrected some. It was enough that I could go back on a golf course and hit golf balls again. But it's still a closed loop. Why? Because when it went wrong, now something else went wrong. And I had to go back to my golf pro. I'm learning in a closed loop scenario. I figured out, and perhaps because I was a trader or whatever, but by this point I was trading, I then figured out I'm asking the wrong question. I'm doing this completely wrong. I went back to another golf pro and I said, I don't want you to fix my golf swing, just fix my golf swing. I want you to teach me the mechanics of a golf swing. I want you to teach me, if I'm hooking a ball, what things could cause me to hook a ball? If I'm slicing a ball, what things could cause me to slice it? If I'm hitting the ball low or, you know, topping the ball, what would cause me to do that? If I wanna get the ball high, if I wanna, all of these things, I wanted, and that's what I just tried to learn. Now, when I got onto a golf course, if I hooked a ball, for example, on a golf course, which I regularly did, I knew it was because of, there were extra number of things, right? It might have been my shoulders, it might have been my grip. I knew the four or five things it could have been, my stance might have been slightly too closed. So there were the four or five things that could cause someone to hook a ball. The number of things, and now I have to go through that feedback loop, that checklist, right? I've just hooked a ball. I've got feedback now, I've hooked a ball. Then figure out what the things were. Beforehand, my closed loop was, I'm hooking the ball, I'm hooking the ball, and I would just try to, just work on lots of different things and just figure out something until it worked. That's not a process. Now, I knew what things it could be, so the next time around, I made sure maybe that my shoulders weren't closed off or I made sure that my stance wasn't closed off and then I would go through and eventually after maybe three or four shots, I would find which one it was and then I'll fix myself. That's the start of open loop. Does that make sense? But I needed to know specifically what caused me to hook or slice or pop or whatever, all the different things that could happen. But until you do that, you can keep going back to a golf pro which many people do and which golf pros love. Every few months and they just fix the next thing and the next thing, but you're not actually learning and you'll never get away from them. So similar process, do you actually know what is right and good and bad about it and can you fix it? And it's something, as I say, obviously I give to my students but when they send videos in, and again, I'll say if whoever you're learning from, can you send them in a video of training and be picked apart? So I'll pick apart in the videos, I'll go through them and explain exactly what was wrong with that trade. Exactly, let's go through the checklist, blah, blah, blah. This was the thing that didn't work with that trade. And what will happen is that usually they didn't figure it out and then the next rate is similar. Which is why generally with the videos that we show and I post them all for all of my students to see, we can see someone, if they, as long as they respond to the feedback, the next time they send a video in, it's usually better than the first one because they can start to learn and then over time, the students themselves learn that process, right? They learn it themselves initially often, I have to help them with it, but that's what it's about. Do you specifically know, once you do that, once you've created that, it becomes a lot easier and I say that happened to my golf, I'm not saying I became scratch golfer but I could correct myself on the golf course. That was huge. Does that make sense, Bruce? Yeah, absolutely. Great, great analogy and makes perfect sense. So let's see, we have a few more questions and then we can wrap it up here. Let's see. Senior Murrow had a few questions in here. First one is the, so yeah, we're looking at the Dome Pro, Bookmap Dome Pro, right now I have it up but he's wondering in terms of latency, how does it compare with TT or QTrader? So the most recent testing that I've seen from one of my students and my students are testing these quite regularly actually because it's obviously a key thing for us is that Bookmap is probably the quickest at the moment. Probably the, yeah, right now it's certainly compared to QTrader and even to TT. So yeah, right now I think it's performing very well. Okay, yeah, sorry to put you on the spot on that but it was the question. He also has another question here. How do you go about preparing your preparation for starting your day? Yeah, good question. So the prep is really important having a whole section on it in the course. Like the prep is really important. It's a bit like being a sportsman. So training at a professional level is like playing sport at a professional level. And you'll know if you're an amateur, you might just do a little warm up before something but not much, but pros will warm up for quite a long time before they play sport, right? Same with training. The prep is like a warm up. If you haven't warmed up properly as a sportsman, you're gonna get hurt. If you haven't prepped properly as a trader, you're gonna get hurt. So you really wanna know all these things about, even if you're training in real time, you wanna be prepared. What does this day look like? What's it looking like? What's coming out news-wise, data-wise? What's happening around the world? Cause markets are obviously 24 hours now. So what's the sentiment like leading into my day? What's all of these things you're asking yourself? Using your experience to try and judge what might be happening. But that prep, how you do it, the decisions you make at that time, the way you prepare can be really important in how you start. And the start can be crucial to your day. But once you get going, of course, then your feedback loops should be taken over. The thing about the prep is you don't have any feedback loops at that point. We haven't traded, so that's why we wanna get it right. Because if you get it wrong, to begin with, you can really struggle and your whole day can be wiped. Particularly if your day starts on the open. The open is where most professionals will make most of their money. So you really wanna get it right. And so you don't wanna waste it. But prep is important. Make sure you do a thorough prep. For most retail traders that I know, their prep involves sort of trying to find or go on our website to figure out what are the key levels today. And that obviously plays no part in my prep market pro. Not interested. Okay, really great stuff Gary to hear. The feedback loops here, how to adjust, how to understand the preparation, the warming up. This is invaluable stuff. Really great to hear. Ka, I'll follow up in text here on your question. Yes, I think multiple data feeds is the way to go. I mean, you have to have stocks, et cetera. And Gary, I had one more question for you. But we've answered all the others. If anyone else has one, maybe last question here. I had one question though for you. With, and I'm just personally curious about this. I've heard now you talk about the here and the now and the real time, time and again. I'm just wondering like there's an argument that or kind of a logic to propose to you here. I understand looking at the dome and understanding that it is very precisely showing the here and the now in real time. The book map heat map is showing you that activity over time and that context and relationship between the liquidity and the transactions and the price structure. Since it is recording it and plotting it onto the chart, wouldn't it make sense then that this is actually showing you something too that is useful as a trader? That is, it's more, it's not about the transactions. It's not about like some sort of market profile. I mean, it is liquidity. It is the action of traders. And yes, I point well taken that anything can happen like half an hour later or several minutes later or several hours later. But the logic of it, at least in my mind, makes sense that you have the heat map, you have the understanding of what the liquidity was then as well as now. It's a good point. I mean, I think the heat, excuse me. Sorry, it's getting late, I've been talking a lot. I think the heat map has been developed for a different style of trading. I've always said, I haven't delved personally too deeply in here because it doesn't, I don't think it would affect me too much. But what I will say is that, perhaps, particularly when you go away from a screen for let's say half an hour and you come back, you need to go for a bit of prep again. I think understanding perhaps how your market responded to various different types of liquidity when you're away may help you to see if anything's changed. Because obviously otherwise, when you go away and you come back, the only thing you can see is what prices it traded at. Okay, you can have a child time themselves and have a look where it's traded. So perhaps it will help you in that kind of prep for that moment of, okay, how has liquidity changed in the time I've been away? Because obviously the DOM only shows you the liquidity now. So I can, I'll give you that, there's that help of particularly when you're not watching it and you're away and you come back, you can see some kind of interaction between liquidity and what was happening and how did liquidity change over the time that I was away? Obviously when we come back, we're interested in what's the liquidity like now because that's what we're trading in. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I can see that. I said, look, it's, I've said this before, it's a different animal to a traditional price chart, right? Which is just a completely flawed concept. Like I just fire anybody to tell me why a price chart has any relevance as a trader, and particularly as a day trader. But the heat map I think is a more interesting or interesting tool for sure. It's just that I haven't, and I'm not trying to be an expert in everything and incorporate everything. I know what I know, I know what I do, and I'd like to be quite specific on that. I always say to my students, if you find, because a number of them obviously are using book map and I say, if you find ways and means of these other tools helping, then let me know and I'm always interested to hear those sorts of things. I'm open to certainly, to that, to anything that involves liquidity, but obviously we come back to trading it in there now. I'm not open to using traditional price charts or all that kind of stuff because the whole assumptions behind it are just frankly dumb, they just don't make sense. They don't add up to help markets work or what I need to look at. Yeah, yeah, makes sense, makes sense. And you've said again and again, like we don't know larger players, activities, what they're doing, if we do, then it's rubbish and why do you wanna know that? But the logic of the argument made sense to me and that's why I wanted to ask it. Let's see, Gilium has a question here. What is the role of intuition in your trading? You try to cut that out as much as possible. You've gotta be trying to make decisions based on real information. I say to my students that sometimes you may have an incarnation that something is going to happen, but it will be based on something you've seen and you hear this thing about gut feel. People thought gut feel was a, whether it's in sport or some people say, I have a gut feeling. I think when it's been studied, it turns out it's not a gut feel, right? It's actually they saw something, you know? And you've had that before, people say, oh, I had a gut feeling to get away from this spot and then like a wall fell down and they go, I don't know why, but it turns out there was some sort of noise, right, or something, but they probably weren't consciously aware, but something told them there was something happening and they got out of the way. I think it's similar. You wanna try and cut it out, particularly as a new trader, you wanna rely on some sort of facts. Again, that's where feedback loops come in. If you create them correctly, then it's based on real information as much as possible. And certainly if one of my students, particularly an early student sent me in a video and said, you know, I bought here, why? You know, I asked him, why? And he would say, well, I just had this feeling. I'm like, yeah, it's just not what people are paying for a course for, right? To figure out that my gut told me to buy. So there needs to be, you know, I can construct and deconstruct, every trade, and that's what I want my students to do as well. Every trade, what was this done for? Why did you do it? And if the answer was, I just thought it was going up or something, then, you know, I'm sorry, that's a massive, massive, you know, a wrap on the knuckles. So if, you know, sometimes I'd say when you become more experienced, you'll make, I just, you know, have this inclination to go towards the bid side here, but it's probably something you've seen on the screen. Otherwise, try to keep it based on something real. Again, that way, your feedback loop is easier. If you're just making too many decisions based on intuition, then what happens when it goes wrong? What's the process now? Okay, I thought it was going up, I didn't, it didn't. Okay, what's the process now? How do you correct that? Get better intuition? That's not a plan. So again, a lot of specifics about what I try and do, and again, part of that specifics is, do I have a plan for when I'm wrong to correct myself? And intuition, there isn't really a plan. I can't see one anyway, for when you're wrong to correct yourself. Yeah, yeah, no, that makes a really, really good sense and well said. We can end on that. Just if there's any parting words, Gary, give you the last word and we can look forward to your next webinar. No, nothing else, I just hope people enjoyed it and thanks again for inviting me on, I appreciate it, Bruce, and good luck to everybody for the rest of the week. Okay, excellent, thank you, Gary. Thank you. Bye-bye.