Anyone every try trading without charts? Just looking at the numbers?
Reason I ask is I was watching that movie ‘Floored’ and there was one trader with a desk full of screens and right in the center she had one screen with just the price numbers and she said all those charts were just for show. All she ever really looks at is the numbers. Just wondering how can someone trade like that?
I was involved in a conversation with another trader a few days ago on this very subject. The floor traders whos job it is all day to remember just numbers find it easy & if you think about on maybe your favorite pair you can do it too.
But with chart technology the way it is today is there a reason not to use them?
no I wouldn’t stop using charts. I’m too visually oriented. But seeing that bit in the movie just got me wondering. Can someone really just trade from the numbers alone. Seems like it would be hard to do but I guess it’s like anything else. It’s what you learn and get used to that works best.
Maybe you could just memorize S/R and fibs? Then trade those, other than that I have no idea how you could trade on just price alone, unless you could visually depict the chart and look for patterns.
They’ve got an internal chart of sorts in their head. It may not be overt, but watching the numbers all the time you get to know the important price levels.
yeah, I was thinking that. Certain levels like daily & weekly highs and lows are just fixed prices. So you trade off those.
Jesse Livermore perfected the art of “seeing” market flow in pure numerical data.
He describes this on page 1 of his 1923 book, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.
That book was supposedly written by Edwin Lefevre, and is generally referred to as a biography of Jesse Livermore.
But, a lot of people (myself included) believe that Livermore actually wrote the book, and published it under Lefevre’s name.
Here’s the first page of his book:
On another thread, I once referred to Jesse Livermore as “arguably the greatest price-action trader of all time.”
It’s astonishing to me how he could see the patterns of price in his mind.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most traders that have been in the biz for more than 15-20 years started as “tape readers”. Bet R Carter and Graviton started reading the tape.
PS CNBC still has the crawl running along the bottom of the screen, some one must be watching it, right?.
Sounds like that boy from the article clint posted did what I was saying, painting a mental picture of patterns and trading them. Could work, though if your present with the data in chatr form in front of you and raw tick data which would you prefer?
I know some people that just use plain charts with no indicators on them at all and trade as well
Ive often thought there has to be a better way than trading with regular charts, I don’t like the way in most trading charts you are forced to trade on irrelevent data.
The high low open close.
I dont see how they are anything more than randomly chosen price quotes from the hundreds of price quotes that arrived during that time period just because the given time period ended or begun.
Those price quotes have no special distinction from the rest they just happened to be the one that showed up at that given moment when the time period ended.
Just have a weird thought. If charts were plotted from historical prices, would a chart be in fact a lagging indicator?
It’s not an “if”, charts ARE made up of historical prices.
However, you couldn’t consider them lagging. Since they are made up of price’s travels, they are history, not averages of history.
How is where price has been, in ANY way irrelevant?
And how would you replace any of the three most used options in line, bar, or candle?
Time and the movement of price are the only two components of a chart.
One is a reflection of price moving across time, and the other two are a reflection of price moving within time.
There is nothing random about it. Price moves, someone buys, it is charted. They are not arbitrarily chosen numbers. The arbitrary choice is made by the buyer or seller.
No special distinction? They were the LAST price used for purchase. Again, no randomness. The only thing one could say is random is the timing of buys or sells. And even that has some rhythm to it.
Esoteric discussion to say the least.
I for one, need my chart.
Of course it would help if I knew what I was looking at:P
Irrelevant in the context that they are used as THE price quote to be traded on, charted by, and that all indicators are created from. When in fact there is nothing about that price quote that makes it any more important than any other.
There is nothing random about it. Price moves, someone buys, it is charted. They are not arbitrarily chosen numbers. The arbitrary choice is made by the buyer or seller.
random in the sense that hundreds of price quotes are created each hour, several hundred each day, but only the one which happens to arrive at the end of the charts time period and the one which arrives at the beginning is used to create indicators and candles open/close prices, in the price feed as a whole these prices are just random price quotes that happen to coincide incidentaly with the clock.
No special distinction? They were the LAST price used for purchase. Again, no randomness. The only thing one could say is random is the timing of buys or sells. And even that has some rhythm to it.
The last price by whose distinction ? Just because it happend to arrive when the clock struck 12 so to speak ? There would be no difference to that than saying the last price is the one that coincided with the tide going out, or the last price is the one that coincides with each 747 that lands at LAX
Esoteric discussion to say the least.
I for one, need my chart.Of course it would help if I knew what I was looking at:P
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Count me as one of them.
Perhaps with Point & Figure or Market Profile charts. Both basically take time out of the equation to a greater or lesser degree.
people like Livermore with that kind of natural numerical talent must be something you are born with. Like some kind of savant like Rainman. Maybe if you look only at numbers long enough hours like he did then you’ll start to see patterns even if you aren’t born with that talent? Anyway, I need my charts.
An old friend of mine coined the phrase…
YLWYL you like what you learn. 
( pronounced like ‘willy will’ a variation of wysiwig )
The way we divide time up into units is an arbitrary human invention. Mostly based on the Earth’s movements days, hours, minutes, seconds… But traders pay attention to prices at those levels and that makes them have significance.
Ahh yes Thanks for bringing those up!
I played with point and figure for a little while. It worked best on the longer numbers. Like the weekly… Didn’t really have the patience for it at the time.
The option to trade directly from a tick chart might be a more accurate way to trade the price action.
wouldn’t trading from a tick chart be a good combination of the two though ?
Good point! If one million traders are waiting for the 1H candle to close to see if it closes above or below yesterday’s high, the arbitrary choice of time becomes very important to the probability of price going up or down.
But in truth, we weren’t trying to demonstrate super powers by tape reading. We just didn’t have live multiple charts to follow all the price changes. I love my charts now, but I still mostly just watch prices when I have many trades going on at the same time. I’ll almost always need to look at a chart before each buy and sell though. There’s just more information there than I can remember off the top of my head, and more information produces better decisions. But in a very fast moving market when I have many trades going at the same time, I revert back to watching the list of prices and trade directly off them. It’s just easier and faster for me. Old habits die hard 
