XBP Tape Players

The XBP Tape Players indicator aims to identify when big players enter the market or are absent from the market, leaving only small players, retail, in it. This paint bar indicator highlights the price bars based on the average traded volume (ATV) size. Big players are identified with big ATV bars, while small players produce small ATV bars.

Price bars are painted in 5 colors based on the following criteria:

• Green: Biggest ATV of the day so far
• Blue: Relative high ATV
• Gray: Normal ATV
• Yellow: Relative low ATV
• Red: Lowest ATV of the day so far

Note that in order to effectively calculate the ATV, the chart needs to be configured as a Ticks chart. The examples covered in this document correspond to a 1,500 ticks chart for the mini ES futures contract (@ES).

The XBP Tape Players indicator helps us to read the market action in different ways. Let’s use the following real mini ES futures chart as an example (22th of July 2015):

Due to the nature of the indicator you will always see big players’ bars at the open and close of the market, when mayor volume happens, just ignore those bars.

Studying the ATV and marking the bars that have relative high and low ATV with the XBP Tape Players indicator helps us to identify “the big game”. It’s easy to spot how the big players bought the market around the same levels and first let the small players to believe that the market was going up, which indeed it was, but not that soon.

The action analyzed in this day is quite typical and you will see it repeatedly. Big players position themselves during the day while letting small players be wrong footed once or twice. Big players will run small players stops to achieve the goal of buying cheap and selling expensive.

The Players indicator helps you to identify the price levels where the big players are taking positions and helps you play accordingly.

You can subscribe this indicator to your TradeStation by clicking the button below: