In terms of who has the most information about the market, I think market makers and any HFT oriented traders probably can tell you more about the state of the market than anyone else. They are essentially at the front lines, and when it comes to conditions, no one has a better take on the state of them than those that stand in the middle of traffic.
Chances are you are not going to fall into this category, and while you do not need to be a master of market microstructure, there are things you can do as a discretionary trader that would also provide you with a certain level of information about the market that few are focused on. One type of trader that falls into this category is the news trader. They have a great view on market conditions and liquidity, since they are constantly getting feedback around how fast the market digests something, and how much buyers or sellers are rewarded. They also see the "non-events", those times when a massive headline drops that should move the needle, but the market just sits there. That lack of reaction is often a bigger tell on positioning and exhaustion than the moves themselves. Over time, they can see how regimes transition. Think of periods where the market gets DDOS'd by Trump headlines, and moves become over-extended and gassed out from rhetoric. This is useful information.
If you do not trade the news, make markets, or focus much on the low timeframe where this feedback is constantly adding up, you could still do yourself a favor by recording and categorizing events and the corresponding market moves. A lot of your job as a discretionary trader, while less scientific than other areas of trading, is pattern recognition. What you should not do, that many traders do, is try to rely on day to day memory of what happened. Your trading is a business, and the same way businesses keep an eye on not only the bottom line but also how many people stepped into their store, you should be recording what happened every single session, any notable events, and what the result of those activities and actions were (headlines, news, etc).
There has never been a better time to do this, and then sort that information with the help of AI. Think of it like building a custom search bar for your own career. Instead of flipping through hundreds of pages of old notes, you can just ask the machine to pull up every instance where a specific setup failed during a high-volatility regime. Or over time when breakouts started moving less and less, if that meant anything for the broader market. It turns a static journal into a live, searchable database.
The goal is to have an extremely comprehensive archive that you can not only use to look at as possible analogues for future developments, but also to have a running understanding of how that feedback is changing over time, in an absolute sense, and a relative sense. Your journal can tell you a lot about the health of the market. Think about someone whose bread and butter was buying new 20-day highs. The transition of that performance over time, from very rewarding to completely unrewarding, is valuable market feedback.
I kind of started this not knowing where I would end with it, but I guess my point is you should be recording as much as possible. If you try to wing it and rely on memory, you are not going to make it. Aside from the data, there’s a massive psychological benefit to this, when you get everything out of your head and onto the page, you're offloading that mental stress. It stops you from ruminating on "what ifs" or carrying the weight of every candle in your head overnight. It clears the slate.
One thing that I have found is that actually just doing a morning update video, and then a night time recap in the Trading Stable, has made me more focused lately. This late in my trading career, it is easier to break good habits and just fly a bit more freely, but I do not think this is a good idea. If you want to do well at this game for the long run, you need to constantly enforce a sense of discipline and rigorous professionalism. Doing the homework, pregame, and postgame, is part of that. Recording data is part of that.
I wasn't really sure how I would end this, I just wanted to get some thoughts out, so maybe it is a “to be continued..”