In this tutorial, Dave Barnhart walks viewers through setting up and customizing MobyTick’s Block Trade Indicator. He demonstrates how to filter trades by minimum price and share size, hide or rearrange columns, and link specific watchlists to individual indicator instances. He creates multiple indicator windows for different thresholds (e.g., $100K, $400K, $1M prints) and shows how to use multi‑monitor setups for simultaneous monitoring. Barnhart then explains the trading value of the indicator: large institutional ("whale") trades can act as dynamic support or resistance levels, signal longer‑term price moves, and provide options‑trading opportunities. He uses a real‑time example of a $4 million trade in AES to illustrate how following such block trades can improve trade timing and risk‑adjusted returns. The video concludes with a recap of the configuration steps and an encouragement to apply the indicator for real‑time market insight.
Chapters
Hey there, and welcome to this video. We're gonna check out the Block Trade indicator in MobyTick, and look how exciting things are out of the gate. All of the colors and prints coming through. You haven't seen share sizes like this before. But let's go ahead and get our Block Trade indicator all configured. So what we're actually seeing here, when you log into Moby for the first time, you're gonna see all trades $50,000 and higher for any price point. So we can see things that are going going across kind of crazy and everything's duplicated. But let's go ahead and figure out some stuff. I'm going to click on these ellipses here and, uh, I'm going to look for, um, things that are 100,000 shares or higher. So I'll just do 100K plus my minimum price. I don't care if something's a few pennies or something. So I'm going to put this at $5 and then my prints over, I'm going to put 100,000. So anything that comes across the Block Trade indicator, that's 100,000 shares or higher. I'm going to wind up seeing that as it comes through. So I'm going to choose submit. Now if we're just looking at this left card, we can see all of the trades that are coming through that are $100,000 or higher. And notice that this is moving much slower than your $50,000. So a lot of this is noise that we don't want to see. Let's customize a couple things here. I'm going to click here, and we do have the bid and the ask on there. So what happens is when a trade comes in, if it's at the bid or at the ask, below the bid, above the ask, or in between, you can customize the colors as you see them. You can also hide specific columns if you didn't want to see them. So here, if I untick bid/ask and choose submit, then the bid/ask is gone. I can also arrange my columns. Say for example, I wanted ticker over here. I wanted time maybe at the end, and then I wanted the size. More interested in the size and then the price. So you can arrange these however you like. So with the second column, what I'm going to do is I'm going to link a watchlist to it, which is kind of cool. Here I'm going to give it a name, which is watchlist. Minimum price going to be $5. It doesn't really matter because you're trading your watchlist stocks. And then prints over, say, 200,000. And then I'm going to untick Select All Tickers because now I can import from a specific watchlist. And so here I can choose all watchlists or just a specific watchlist that I have in my list. I'm going to choose Import, and we get all of the tickers here. So we can add and remove tickers, either add them by searching by name and for ticker down here, Or you can just tick the X to remove some of them, but then get your Block Trade indicator all set up. So I'm going to choose Submit. Oh, and before I should do that, I should give it a name of Watchlist, and we'll set it to 200,000. Okay, so now we can see our watchlist with the information coming across as the trades come through. Now these other ones you can do with as you will. So we've got $100,000 here for the entire market. We've got our watch list over here. Let's look for trades that are just over $400,000. So I'm going to call this one $400K plus, and we'll do a minimum share size of $5, and we'll do $400K, and we'll choose submit. Okay, and then this last one, let's just do over a million. So I'm going to call this one 1 million plus, and we will look for prints over a million here. And we're all set. So we can see as we get higher on the print filters that there are less trades. So over here, the 1 million plus, there aren't a lot for today, right? Which means there'll be less 400,000s than there are 100,000s. The other thing you can do is hide your title. You can also break out Mobi into separate screens. So many traders had different monitors, so you can choose this plus that's here, and then you get another instance of Mobi where you can have a second block trade indicator if you like, or, or you can open another feature. So traders that have 3, 4, 5 monitors, you can have several instances of Mobi open and looking at different things at the same time. So how does a block trade indicator help me, you ask? Well, when you see large value trades like this, for example, almost $4 million on AES, that's $13.45, right? That's a huge amount of money. And when we're trading, knowing where these big institutions, AKA whale traders, whatever you want to call them, knowing where they have their positions, these can be support and resistance lines in the sand. And we have to keep in mind that these Institutional traders aren't scalping. They're in it for a longer period of time. So when we start looking at charts— and check out my video on the print lookup— when we start checking out those sorts of things, seeing where they're buying and selling, you don't want to be caught on the business end of the shark or the whale. You want to swim along with them. If they're going long, I want to be on their team. And the benefit of that is If we're going to follow along with a 4 million share trade like in AES, then we might see that we will be in the trade longer. The other advantage of that is knowing that there's going to be a larger move over time. We can catch the options chain off guard and then get massive returns for a smaller amount of investment with lower risk. This also gives you a real-time look at the market. As we progress through the day. I hope you find this information helpful, and we'll see you in the next video.
