The Origin of OFA
How did the Order Flow Analytics™ get its start? Let’s take a look at order flow pioneer Donald “D.B.” Vaello, how he got into trading, and how a personal need led to the development of the Order Flow Analytics chart trading toolkit.
D.B. was introduced to trading by his father at an early age (his first trade was called in when he was 16 years old). “[My father] worked in telecommunications, but we didn’t sit around talking about fiber optics. We talked about trading. As young as eight, ten years old I was learning about moving averages,” says Vaello.
As an undergraduate student in college, he formed a trading group, earning a leadership role because of his early trade successes. D.B. quickly found himself informally advising his friends on trading strategies.
It wasn’t always easy. “I remember vividly blowing up my account in college. It was a 10-day process then I was broke. But it was college…I wasn’t supporting a family at the time,” he recalls.
He got back on his feet by working hard for several months to save enough money to fund a new account. Once he recovered, he continued educating others on trading. When they went their separate ways, many in the group stayed in touch, following D.B.’s advice through chat rooms. But teaching his trading principles became challenging because it was difficult to explain how order flow analysis should be practiced during live trading. So he developed a course book for his trading friends. Unfortunately an unscrupulous trader took the content and sold it under his own name. Frustrated, D.B. decided to develop his ideas further and market his order flow approach himself.
While doing this, he looked everywhere for tools that would enable him to analyze the market using order flow data. Several charting vendors had begun to release bid/ask style charts, but the analytics were technically flawed. After repeatedly being turned away from companies who saw his suggestions as counterproductive to their marketing efforts, he decided to develop a tool himself. His objective wasn’t to become a vendor or trading guru. He simply wanted to solve a problem so he could become a better trader. “I never imagined being in the software business,” he says.
His first step was to create an application that could organize time and sales data into a format that could be used to reveal a structure behind price movement. Beginning in 2003, his small group of traders were the first to see for themselves how trade orders were being executed at auction (into the bid or into the offer). The result? The first version of Order Flow Analytics.
He shared his creation with others who began to see incremental successes in their trading. So in 2006, D.B. decided to make the toolkit available commercially. Since then, he has worked tirelessly to refine and improve the OFA product.
D.B.’s passion as an educator, honest approach to providing a quality solution, and desire to make a difference in the trading industry is what has helped improve the functionality and feature set embedded in the OFA platform. You’ll find DB continuing to educate traders and help get traders to trade more successfully by providing insight and guidance and sharing his success as an order flow trader. Unlike so many self-proclaimed trading educators today, he is willing to genuinely help others succeed by helping them “learn to fish” using order flow analysis.
In Part 2, we’ll look at how the development of the Order Flow Analytics chart trading toolset came to be.