[bluemosaic]

Sounds like I am trying to over complicate this analysis then. So what should I be looking for when assessing breakouts and pullbacks with trend? Just increase of volume ?

I am trying to understand the best approach to recognising signs of accumulation during a stage 1 phase or during a stage 2 trend when the trend pauses in a range -targeting the trader time frame. I currently look at the price movement ie. How far it moves compared to volume. If volume around or above average but price staying approx. Same then I see this as accumulation . Is this correct? Anything else I should look for? What about using level 2 price info? Thanks

This is not something I can give you much help on, as volume is one on the trickiest measures to gauge, as the large players use a variety of methods to hide their large transactions during consolidation periods in order not to move the price too much before they've filled their total amount that they need to fill.

A newish method, which we've talked about a bit on here and the old thread before called "Effective Volume" was developed by Pascal Willain to try to uncover what the large players are doing during those periods, and uses a technique to separate the individual trade data between the large players and the small players. It's quite complicated and he wrote a whole book about it called "Value in Time", but there is one website that has it available to use on US stocks for free - which is chartmill.com, and so can sometimes help you to see when a stock is being accumulated or distributed by large players.