How can I determine if the volume of the day (or intraday) is from buyers or sellers? Is this indicator available or do you just assume based on the price going up or down? I know that Level II quotes give a picture of the current queue. This may be irrelevant if the price is all I should be concerned about.

Generally, if a stock is moving up on strong volume, it is an indication that there are more buyers than sellers of the stock. Otherwise, the stock would not be rising. The buyers have the edge. You are correct that you can look at the Level II for a particular stock you can get a snap shot. You can also look at the time and sales table and look to whether the big trades are on the bid side or ask side to determine if there are buyers or sellers. You can also look at the interval chart on eSignal and set it to show volume bars. If you see the stock rising on a big spike in volume, the volume is most likely buy side volume.

As for the major indexes, you can look specifically at up and down volume on a daily and intraday basis. Yahoo has this feature on its finance page. The link is: http://quote.yahoo.com/m0?u. Some have had trouble with the link, so go to Yahoo’s finance page, click on Market Digest, and that will take you where you need to be.