You might want to consider trading off of order book data. These links help understand the concept of this depending on your market data source

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http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/topic/6597-please-review-my-bidask-strategy/

There is also the concept of market delta trading

http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/topic/6031-delta-volume-in-intraday-trading/page/4/

Here are some highlight quotes from these links

 
Like I said before, delta only tells you something in context. If there is a high delta with high movement, that means market makers and reversion traders have pulled their limit orders for the time being. If you see a high delta with low movement, especially in the context of a level, you can take that to mean that aggressive buyers or sellers have run into a large amount of limit orders

Ninjatrader_Staff
I am not sure I can answer the difference between institutional versus retail since I am not clear on the definition of what institutional is myself. Take for example, TelventDTN, the company that owns the technology behind the IQFeed service, Kinetick service and Prophet X service. IQFeed and Kinetick target the retail active trader where Prophet X is mainly installed in institutions. Different target markets, same technology. CQG targets institutions however; we just announced partnership with them to address our main demographic, the retail trader. Zen-Fire, technology used in institutions and prop shops however, NinjaTrader/Zen-Fire heavily used by the retail trading community. My point is that here are three products that clearly overlap both retail and institutional space using the same technology.
 
Let me clarify some definitions…Market data service only provides data, trading engines provide data and order routing.
 

• Unfiltered data: Some provide it, some provide option to aggregate it, and in the case of the trading engine providers, filtered vs. unfiltered is dependent on the FCM who hosts the technology

• Time stamps: All market data vendors provide time stamps however, only some trading engines do thus, the client application must add a time stamp to incoming ticks

• Historical data: All market data vendors provide it, most trading engines do not

• Historical bid/ask prices per tick: Most vendors do not provide this

• Compression: Some vendors provide compression, some optional compression some do not

My response likely does not make things much clearer. I think the point is simply, what do need as a trader? My comments are based on my direct experience in working with and writing to 15+ market data/brokerage API’s.

Some complicated research papers were mentioned as well

http://www.tradingphysics.com/Resources/Papers/