|
Details on QnAs 1156, 1155, 1154, 1153, 1152, 1150, 1149, 1146, 1140 |
August 16 , 2006
6:31 Ensign Howard: Welcome to today's training class with Ensign. I hope you have had a great week and enjoying the remaining days of summer.
16:32 Ensign Howard: What I wanted to focus on today was some of the information published to our Q&A Knowledgebase articles over the past couple of weeks. There has been some really good information, and possibly in need of further discussion as you are exposed to it and have questions about it. So lets begin.
16:34 Ensign Howard: I will post links for veiwing information and if you see garbage instead of text, or are missing the images when some should be present, you can click on the Go button at the top of the view and it should refresh the view and show properly.
16:34 @Buffy: or click in viewer and hit F5
http://www.ensignsupport.com/email/1156.mhtml
16:36 Ensign Howard: A new post was made by a customer to elitetrader web site, and we appreciate the positive commentary that users make about Ensign. All prior posts to elitetrader site about Ensign have been quite positive, and you are welcome to click on the link in the viewer to further reading when you have time. Other programs to not seem to receive as favorable reveiws as Ensign gets from their users.
16:39 Ensign Howard: One of the products mentioned on the elitetrader site was ZeroLineTrader which is a front end to the TWS for IB feed. I have looked at their web site, and am interested in their product and the postive feedback they received, especially in comparison to the feedback about NinjaTrader.
16:40 craig: I use it and like it
16:40 ajm: I use ZLT is very good and $5/month
16:40 Arbis: Check out Button Trader -- major pos. feedback.
16:41 craig: I use it
16:40 Ensign Howard: So, first question is whether any one here today happens to be a user of ZeroLineTrader?
16:41 Ensign Howard: so craig and ajm use it, and arbis recommends buttontrader and the feedback from you is all positive?
16:41 craig: very
16:41 ajm: is great
16:41 Ensign Howard: ok, thx
16:42 Randy: Only Button trader here.. will not change
16:42 Ensign Howard: As I was investigating ZLT, I also came across a forum thread that mentioned Ensign posted by VeracityTrader. Has anyone used VeracityTraders product with Ensign and ZLT?
16:43 Ensign Howard: I guess not. I do not know much about either product, however, VeracityTrader did have an engaging video showing Ensign and ZLT working together, which I think I will venture to show in the class today.
www.veracitytrader.com/Playback/ZLT/ZLTLINK.html
16:47 Ensign Howard: Click on the link I just posted and then uncheck the Show box so other links posted do not interrupt the movie. Is it playing for you?
16:48 al_gorithm: y
16:48 sum_1: y
16:48 Arbis: Complete with cheesy theme music
16:48 TOC: never had a trading platform sing to me
16:48 craig: just fine - he isnt expecting alot out of that trade, is he
16:49 Arbis: So is he using the same playback files as you are -- is that the point.
16:49 Randy: Very climatic!
16:50 TOC: Wonder what it plays if you are in a loosing trade
16:50 al_gorithm: lol
16:51 zola: That kaching over the music sounds out of place
16:51 tip: Jaws theme
6:51 craig: kaching never sounds out of place
16:51 Ensign Howard: ok, thx for watching..... you can learn more about what veracitytrader has to offer on the internet and also about ZeroLineTrader
16:51 Arbis: What's the point? -- Is it the playback file usage for sim trading?
16:51 TOC: those comments a part the the platform?
16:51 al_gorithm: finished here
16:52 Ensign Howard: I do not know TOC
16:52 craig: stopped here also
16:52 Ensign Howard: Veracity has an ESPL script that apparently is driving the trades to ZLT, and ZLT will trade your account
16:52 TOC: Is the idea that it autotrades the TL cross?]
16:52 Ensign Howard: The point has nothing to do with playback. The point has to do with the ZLT interface to your IB account. Anyway, I will try to learn more about ZLT over the coming weeks.
16:53 Arbis: So it can take its trades directly from Ensign? Without your input?
6:53 Ensign Howard: Possibly. I also need to learn more about what others are doing with Ensign
16:54 ajm: The owner of ZLT is called Hong and his phone is 310-279-7751
www.ensignsupport.com/email/1155.mhtml
16:55 Ensign Howard: ok, moving on, lets quickly cover some of the other posts to Q&A..... click on the link just posted. Oft times in newsletters we may have a DYO article that mentions a template is available.
16:55 craig: jiberish
16:56 mano: craig clk cursor in Window and hit F5
16:56 al_gorithm: if go/F5 doesn't work, hit the right, then left arrow buttons at top
16:56 craig: got it
16:56 Ensign Howard: Instead of using a web browser to look for it, use the Internet Services form in Ensign to download the template
16:57 bg: Howard btw that kase peak oscillator is fantastic - I made few changes but but great job
16:57 Ensign Howard: Any questions about getting templates from our web site using Internet Services?
6:58 Ensign Howard: And, if you want to share templates you would send them to me for upload and then they will populate this list
www.ensignsupport.com/email/1154.mhtml
17:00 @Buffy: Some older templates that used to be there are gone but you still have on your website -- pyra and nq133 are two I was asked about - thanks for keeping. :-)
17:00 Ensign Howard: I do not know why this issue has come up this week, but when I get a couple of support e-mail from different users on the same topic, it makes me start to think that in some chat room a few users mutually edited the Sync time on the chart and that affects how 60 minute bars are built.
17:02 Ensign Howard: so, as the article explains, if you do edit the Sync time and then refresh a chart, the new bars will be interleaved with existing bars. Solution to heal the chart is to delete bars leftward and refresh so you have a single set of bars.
17:02 Ensign Howard: Thanks Buffy for helping someone with this issue last week.
www.ensignsupport.com/email/1153.mhtml
17:04 Ensign Howard: The material on the Kase indicators is worth reading..... the author apparently is widely regarded for her work and her mastery of the mathematics. Kase has a few indicators, and there are 3 in our Q&A database implemented in DYOs. This article shows how to put the KaseCD which is a spread of the Kase Peak Oscillator with an average of the same. And the use of the tool is to look for divergence formations.
7:07 Ensign Howard: You can use the Divergence study in Ensign with the KaseCD by changing the Data Point for the Divergence to reference the Moving Average Spread, and one trick is to match the Divergence spinner on the Trend line with the size of the spinner for Spread on the Moving average.
17:07 Ensign Howard: In my example the spread us magnified by a 3, so the same 3 needs to be on the Divergence form, and then the divergence lines will be correctly placed on the spread histogram of the Moving Average in the sub window they share.
7:08 Ensign Howard: Kase says the signals are in the 80 to 90% range, but I have my reservations about such claims. You can check it out. I think the signal counted end up being hand picked, and visual, instead of via a computer model, such as our Divergence tool.17:09 bg: Howard why is the moving averages set at 1 and 7
17:10 Ensign Howard: Too often we visually skip setups or signals that really do qualify, and just jump to the visual at significant turns, and sure enough the significant turn did have a divergence present, so you want to count that as a successful signal.17:10 Ensign Howard: 1, is to have a value of the source, which is the Kase Peak Oscillator which is Line B of the DYO referenced. The 7 is an arbitrary moving average of the same input value.
17:09 ajm: Howard on the DYO you showed some of the settings are hard to read. On the left side under Ave 1 Data Point which page is it referencing?
17:11 Ensign Howard: The DYO referenced is the 2nd DYO in the Kase Peak Oscillator template that you can download from our web site.
17:11 Ensign Howard: So it is 2nd DYO, Line B that is the Peak Oscillator value that is plotted as a histogram in red and gree in the sub-window and then the thicker blue histogram is the spread created by this Moving Average
17:12 Ensign Howard: In the image, the 1st average with parm of 1 is plotted and rides the histogram perimeter of the red and green and the thick red curve is the 7 period MA. The blue histogram is the spread of the blue curve minus the red moving average curve.
17:14 Ensign Howard: You will have to read up on Kase's work later, but the information links in the article are a starting point.
17:14 Rice: Kase writes as though her approach is infallible, which justifies Howard's skepticism. fwiw, Kase has traded commodities primarily, which have more tendency to mean reversion and thus better performance by oscillators. Her book Trading With the Odds has some worthwhile concepts in any event, IMO.
17:15 Ensign Howard: Thx Rice for the contribution to the discussion
www.ensignsupport.com/email/1152.mhtml
17:15 Ensign Howard: In this Q&A article, I show an interesting and clever little trick
17:17 Ensign Howard: in this DYO example, the user has conditions that can trigger more than once, but he wanted to mark only the first occurance of each so that when the green marker is shown, it does not show again until a red marker shows, and vice versa.
17:17 Arbis: Very common problem, IMHO
17:17 Ensign Howard: So once green shows, next event must be a red, and then next event must be a green. So lets discuss the solution
17:18 Ensign Howard: We employ a private GV of 250 to keep track of a counter. This counter we will increment when a green marker is shown and that is done by Line E. This counter will again be incremented when a red marker is shown, and that incrementing is done by Line J.
17:19 Ensign Howard: Lets talk about the Line I and J combo
17:20 Ensign Howard: Line I is the AND condition of 3 boolean flags, and when all 3 are True, then the Red chevron is shown on the chart, and this Boolean True result of Line I is stored in GV[255]
17:21 Ensign Howard: Line J reads this result from Line I, and the IF ( GV[255]) is the boolean test, and when it is TRUE, the Value from 250 is read, and the Number 1 from the number field is added to Value, and the result is written back to [250]
17:22 Ensign Howard: When the flag in GV[255] is False, then the 3rd parameter of the expression is performed, and that simply reads Value, so it can be written back to [250]
17:22 Ensign Howard: So when the flag is True, content of [250] is incremented by 1
17:22 Ensign Howard: When the flag is False, the content of [250] is maintained unchanged.
17:22 Arbis: I wish there was a check box on the Alerts properties window to this effect -- "Only Alert Once per condition" or something. Make life a lot simpler. This DYO is clever, but it shouldn't be this difficult.
17:23 Ensign Howard: I am trying so show you how this statement on Line J accomplishes an incrementing of our counter. Now the purpose of the counter was to control the oscillation of the markers taking turns.
7:25 Ensign Howard: Basically, I did this taking turns by testing the counter in[250] for whether the counter was an Even or an Odd number. The Line C does this test.
17:25 Gerard: What does value modulo mean?
17:25 Ensign Howard: Modulo takes the value and divides by 2 in our case, and we keep only the remainder. So a value of 15 mod 2 has a remainder of 1, this is non-zero so the number must be ODD. A value of 18 mod 2 has a remainder of zero, so this number must be EVEN
17:28 Ensign Howard: So the Line C test is testing for a remainder of zero, ie. an EVEN number, and when this is True, then that is one of the 3 tests which permits the green Chevron to be shown. The counter has incremented to an Even number which means it is now Greens turn to show when the other two conditions from Line A and B also are present. And then Line H is the inverse of our Even / Odd test.
17:28 Ensign Howard: If the number is not Even, it must be Odd, and that is the permission for Red chevron to take its turn to be shown when its other 2 conditions on line F and G are present.
17:30 Ensign Howard: So, arbis, you might investigate some of the ideas shown in this example if you have a companionship paring of signals and what them to show a single time and take turns before showing again.
17:30 Ensign Howard: Any questions about the counter, incrementing it, or modulo math? If not, we will move on.
www.ensignsupport.com/email/1150.mhtml
17:32 Ensign Howard: In this Q&A, we document a new property on the Setup | Charts form
17:33 Ensign Howard: Some of you have window arrangements that overlap, and as such when we move the chart image leftward of the chart below, it pulls part of the left side image of the covering window. Our workaround to this behavior is to offer this check box to repaint the chart when this left shift event occurs at bar completion. We do this instead of the left shift which pulls the overlapping window image in the left shift. Now this repaint process is slower than shifting the image, so it is a check box option
7:35 Ensign Howard: if you do not overlap windows, then have the box unchecked.
17:35 Ensign Howard: If you do overlap windows, it is now your choice to tolerate the striping that occurs for the sake of greater speed, or you can check the box and Ensign will repaint the window automatically.
17:36 @Buffy: Overlap charts left to right instead of right to left works also and keep the cursor in the scale area or workspace background and not on a chart
17:36 Ensign Howard: In the past when you did not have this choice, the solution to repaint the chart was to manually click on the chart which would bring it to the top surface and repaint it in the process, and thus clean up the striping
17:36 Ensign Howard: That is correct buffy and a good suggestion.
www.ensignsupport.com/email/1149.mhtml
17:38 Ensign Howard: In this 1149 post, it is the grid lines of the Ergodic I want to discuss
17:38 @Buffy: This one I like -- which is better for cpu using daily lines to do this or the dyo?
17:39 Ensign Howard: The example shows using a DYO to put on lines in different colors, and one can also add labels like [A] to have values showing7:39 Ensign Howard: Advantage of the DYO over the DPL is that the DYO will nicely keep extending the grid lines as chart moves leftward. Doubt speed difference is an issue
17:40 Ensign Howard: However, having shown this, I wanted to mention a small change in the Grid selection tool on the Ergodic property form. Now, instead of percentages of the window for grid line placement the selection is for specific levels for the grid
17:42 Ensign Howard: so on the Ergodic property form, a check on the 25 will show a line at the 25 level, which is a constant as the ergodic sub-window range expands or contracts to show the study, the grid lines will move up or down in the window accordingly. The line will be at 25 and so labeled. This will accomplish much of what the user wanted in the first place, other than also wanting lines in multiple colors.
17:43 Ensign Howard: A similar change was made to the CCI grid property form, to show the specific levels where the grid lines will show, instead of using percentage of window range.
7:45 Ensign Howard: So if you want a grid line on the 0 level, check the 0 box. Previously this line was labeled as 50% for the midpoint of the sub-window. I was always wondering now which percent box do I check to get a grid line at 100 and 200..... now it is more obvious.
17:45 Ensign Howard: Any questions?
7:46 @Buffy: What version was this change made in please?
17:46 Ensign Howard: Starting with yesterday's
17:46 @Buffy: tks
17:47 Ensign Howard: www.ensignsupport.com/email/1146.mhtml
17:47 Ensign Howard: In the Sept issue of Stocks and Commodities, was an article about Adaptive Price Zone. In the third party coding section of the magazine Ensign shows its implementation of the study. I have written a template that contains the multiple DYOs I wrote to support the article in the magazine. The template does the study, and it also has a trade system implemented so I could get some back testing results.17:49 Ensign Howard: So download the template from the Internet Services form, read the article, and my opinion of it, and the authors feedback about my opinion.
17:51 Ensign Howard: Seems like S&C published everything I submitted to them, which is a bit surprizing as I think I provided more than my share. I got the impression that I was one of the few who took the time to understand the study and its limitations. So I thought the material presented and the author's response was balanced reporting. The bottom line is the author did some cherry picking in hindsight to find a period of time and parameters to use that made the bands look like good indicators. The bands are similar to what you already do with Keltner bands, so do not get your hopes up that it is a holy grail
17:54 Ensign Howard: Read, learn, and proceed with wisdom and caution.
17:54 Ensign Howard: The biggest value of the template is the trade system implementation I used for obtaining the test results shown in the article.
17:54 Ensign Howard: any questions?
17:55 Ensign Howard: www.ensignsupport.com/email/1140.mhtml
17:56 Ensign Howard: Now, the October issue of S&C will have an article about doing a Relative Strength Index on the spread of 2 moving averages. While other products will show lengthy coding to implement this Relative Spread Strength RSS indicator, in Ensign it is easily accomplished using our Study On Study capability, where you edit the Data Point of the one study to reference as input data from another study.
17:57 Ensign Howard: So have the Move Average study on the chart with parameters of your choosing. Then put on the RSI and as shown in our property form, select the average, and its Spread. Now you have an RSI on the Spread of the MA. This is the RSS without any special coding or DYO to implement it.
17:58 zola: that's clever
17:58 Ensign Howard: It is not rocket science, and happens to be easily implemented in Ensign. And next month you can read the authors promotion of his research
17:59 Ensign Howard: Anyway, that is all the time I have for class today.
17:59 Ensign Howard: Thanks for attending.
17:59 zola: Excellent class, thank you
17:59 @Buffy: Thank you Howard
17:59 Ensign Howard: I will get Kimball here to continue class Q&A with you as some probably came to get help after class.
17:59 traden4x: thanks
17:59 Ensign Howard: welcome. Bye
Refreshing with ESPL
8:05 Jo: I have GVs that are written out every 5 seconds with ESPL, but the charts only update when they receive ticks. I'd like the charts to update the GV studies each time the GV is updated. How best to do that?
18:07 Ensign Kimball: You could use the ESPL 'Refresh' command to recalc the chart, but I think that would be overkill. I would suggest you stick with Ticks...to update the chart.
18:13 Jo: The problem is IB only updates a tick when there is a price change. The charts can hang there quite a while and the money flow can change significantly. Right now I'm watching a spredsheet scroll so I don't miss the changes and it's quite a pain. Can I refresh just the one chart? I'll look at the manual for Refresh.
18:14 Ensign Kimball: Create a User Defined Symbol, and update it yourself. Use the ESPL 'Update' command.
18:15 Jo: I have one of those for the NDX 100 "Tick". I'll try using that instead of a standard chart of the index. Thanks. I'll be interested in your response to my email today about calculations with vArray idex values that are read from Excel. Somethings amiss there. Hope it can be fixed with a simple code change. Thanks again