Price and volume are the only true leading indicators. When elephants walk across your front lawn they leave footprints. The elephants are the pros and the lawn is a price and volume chart. Below is a 3 min es chart from yesterday.
Pros sell on up (blue) bars of weakness and buy on down (red) bars of strength. Pros buy wholesale and sell retail. It enables them to use very tight stops. Tight stops enable smaller margin which enables a better risk reward ratio and a greater cash on cash return.
On the red arrow sell prices rose from the open of the next bar 1 tick. On the blue arrow buy prices never traded below the open. With market orders the entries needed a 3 tick and a 2 tick stop respectively.
The black lines are what I term order flow levels – where pros and ams exchange money – the purpose of mkts. Price and volume work in any market in any time frame. Price and volume enable a trader who can read the bars to anticipate what must happen to meet the inventory objectives of pros 2 or more bars before price moves accordingly.