Richard Wykoff is the father of price-volume analysis that forms the foundation of the modern trading method that we teach at TradeRounds.com.  Prior to the advent of charting software, he was able to identify through the observation of the speed of the stock ticker-tape the oversized volume/hands of large traders who seemed to control stock price movement.  Fortunately, in the era of computers we are able to view volume automatically.

For the overall stock market, high frequency trading, driven by computers is responsible for over 50% of the total daily trading volume.  These operators along with other large institutional types control the price action of the market and individual stocks. From a Wyckoff perspective, it is not necessary to identify the individual actors within these groups but rather to understand their power to control the outcome of your trade.  Thus, Wyckoff gave us one of our favorite terms, the Composite Operator, to give a mental image of our trading opponent. At TradeRounds, through our free stock trading education Newsletter, Premium Newsletter, and Gold Level Membership we teach our students to identify the hidden hand of the Composite Operator.  In particular, our Gold Level Membership provides numerous stock trading video education tools to help a trader ride along with the big players, including our Basics of Charting, Equivolume, and Pivot Point video stock trading education tutorials.