Thread by @breakingthemark

How do you determine a car's speed?

Well one way is to measure the flow of gas going into the engine, do some math with that and the size of the engine, further calculate it with the dimensions of the crank shaft, input the current gearing ratio...

of the car, apply the weight of the car and the diameter of the wheels, and then add in the slope of the road and wind speed.

With all that you could calculate how a cars speed and you would have a good understanding of why its at that level.

Or...

You could just measure the wheel RPM, and use it's diameter to figure out the car's speed.

Which one would you go with?

Now I read these current papers which attempt to use order flows to explain market behavior, and I wonder...

Maybe they can explain whats going on inside the market,

but is it all too much information and complexity that I'm still just better off focusing on the obvious variables the inner working produce rather than paying attention to the elaborate inner workings themselves?

Until someone says:
"if you know the flow of gas to the engine (and that we can measure it accurately), you can state the cars velocity faster and more precisely than simply measuring wheel speed"

I don't think I'm going to act on any of these order flow papers.

I'll keep..

reading them as there are some interesting tidbits in them. We all like to understand how things work.

But ultimately I'm really looking to understand why I should act differently and I'm not sure the "inner workings of order flow" are ever going to tell me that.