You can scalp the Bitcoin futures contract (like MBT for Micro Bitcoin) with a Footprint chart even if you won’t see a lot of people doing it on the video platforms.
The reason why you won’t see it often is that if you open a “standard” footprint chart on Bitcoin, you’ll probably say: “damn what’s this crappy contract, not even 1 contract at every line, it’s untradeable!”:
You would be right.
But if you take a Nasdaq contract with a very low timeframe, you’ll get something a low volume of contracts too.
1. Grouping the ticks with NT orderflow volumetric bars
What you should on volatile instruments is grouping the ticks to display price levels on the chart and have some footprint cells that add the volume of several price levels in one single cell. It will make it readable and tradeable.
If you are using the Ninjatrader orderflow pack with the volumetric bars, there’s an option to do that: “Ticks per level“:
2. Grouping the ticks with others Footprint indicators
While you’ll find a similar parameter using some Footprint indicator, for some others there is no such parameter.
But there is a trick to do it.
If you go to the Tools -> instruments menu from Ninjatrader and look for your instrument:
Then select the instrument and click “edit”, you will get the Instrument settings window.
You can increase the Tick size there:
For instance using MBT Instrument, the default Tick size is 5. If you set 10, you will get more contracts traded per cell:
Now you can set a Range 8 chart with some relevant footprint data. And if you want more numbers in the cells, you can group the ticks a bit more by increasing the same configuration.
The only drawback to doing this is the following:
Ninjatrader will set 1 price every 10 ticks level (if you set 10 for instance) and this will apply as a global configuration in the platform, meaning that you will be able to open a trade at 112800 and 112790 for instance, but you won’t be able to open a position at 112795 because this price won’t be available anymore as the tick size is the minimal value used.
But… there are solutions. You can still analyze your footprint chart on Ninjatrader and place your orders on another platform, modify the tick size on the mini contract and trade the Micro, or Add an instrument to the Ninjatrader list to duplicate the instrument using another name.
3. Scalping Bitcoin’s order flow in Action with the scalping suite
Below is a video example of a sell trade I took on Micro bitcoin contract using the scalping suite order flow tools that helped me to see sellers.
All the analysis has been done on Ninjatrader while I executed on a DOM at the center. The DOM allows me to trader a prop firm that is not compatible with Ninjatrader.
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