buysell volume indicator interpretation

[johnnymustard]

hello, i need explanation for buy/sell volume indicator. i traded sim on 1min chart today with this indicator on and noticed that no matter what, buy vol always > sell vol. in about 20 mins, mini s&p dropped 6 points and buy vol was greater each of those minutes. that cannot be. price cannot drop that much when there is more buying than selling. this has to be measuring something else. every single 1min bar for a day session has greater buy vol, every one?!?
most bars it's obvious difference. for the ones that are close, i checked manually. if there was more buy vol every minute for the whole business day, the price would have gone straight up.
buy vol = blue
sell vol = red
NT help file was useless for this issue.
times are PST. thank you for your help. johnny

[NinjaTrader_Matthew]

Hello,

This indicator will only tell us where the trades have been executed relative to the bid or ask. There is no way of knowing if these orders were actually buys or sells and only offer a interpretation of what was happening on that time.

You can review the source code of this indicator by going to Tools--> Edit NinjaScript--> Indicator.

A Buys is plotted when the Close (LastPrice) of the current bar is greater than the CurrentAsk Price

A Sells is plotted when the Close of the currentbar is less than the CurrentBid Price

[JoshDance]

hello, i need explanation for buy/sell volume indicator. i traded sim on 1min chart today with this indicator on and noticed that no matter what, buy vol always > sell vol. in about 20 mins, mini s&p dropped 6 points and buy vol was greater each of those minutes. that cannot be. price cannot drop that much when there is more buying than selling. this has to be measuring something else. every single 1min bar for a day session has greater buy vol, every one?!?
most bars it's obvious difference. for the ones that are close, i checked manually. if there was more buy vol every minute for the whole business day, the price would have gone straight up.
buy vol = blue
sell vol = red
NT help file was useless for this issue.
times are PST. thank you for your help. johnny

I think you are misunderstanding the display. The total height of the bar is the total volume, and the blue portion is offer volume (a "buy") and red is bid volume (a "sell"). Understand?

[johnnymustard]

thanks for taking a look josh. when i display the indicator in the data box, buy volume is always > sell volume and the two values regularly do not add up to total volume. so i may be misinterpreting it, but not the way you suggest. try it and you'll see what i mean. thank you for your input. JM

[JoshDance]

thanks for taking a look josh. when i display the indicator in the data box, buy volume is always > sell volume and the two values regularly do not add up to total volume. so i may be misinterpreting it, but not the way you suggest. try it and you'll see what i mean. thank you for your input. JM

I see what you mean about the data box. This is a labeling error. What's labeled as "Buys" is in fact "Total" and "Buys" should be Total-Sells in this case. This is the correct way to interpret the data, and what I suggested is correct. Put up a volume histogram aside this and you'll see that the amount of the volume histogram is equal to the volume on each bar of the BuySellVolume indicator. NT, can you confirm this error?

Still, if you see equal amounts of red and green in a bar, then buys and sells are EQUAL for that bar. On the practical side of things, you should consider looking at gomi's delta tools if you are into delta. They are much better than NT's indie, and I have doubts as to the reliability of the BuySellVolume indicator as I compare it side by side with other tools which are known and confirmed to be 100% accurate. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

[NinjaTrader_Matthew]

Hello Josh,

Yes, I can confirm that the total buys = total volume in the databox.

This is done for display purposes. If we displayed this any other way, you potentially not see the number of buys if they were less than sales. This is why we opted to turn the databox off by default.

[JoshDance]

Hello Josh,

Yes, I can confirm that the total buys = total volume in the databox.

This is done for display purposes. If we displayed this any other way, you potentially not see the number of buys if they were less than sales. This is why we opted to turn the databox off by default.

I understand Matthew, but it is mislabeled and thus incorrect. In the databox, the label should read "Total Volume" and "Total Sells" ... to say otherwise gives a very incorrect value.

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Thanks for the feedback.