Yearly Archives: 2013

EasyLanguage & PowerLanguage Tutorials – Lesson 02: Coding A Moving Average

EasyLanguage & PowerLanguage Tutorial - Lesson 02: Coding A Moving Average Creating the first real indicator and expanding the basics After you familiarized yourself with the PowerLanguage Editor in the previous PowerLanguage tutorial - lesson 01 we will now build up on this foundation. In case you haven't read the last lesson, I would suggest doing that first as it can help you with understanding this lesson, too. Let's start with today's lesson now. Open the PowerLanguage Editor and create a new Indicator study. I will name mine ABC_PowerLanguage Lesson 02 - Moving Average so I can find it easily within my editor later. The name is totally up to you of course and you could even change it later. As the last part of the indicator name suggests, we will create and plot a moving average today. You have probably seen a moving average on a chart before or remember the term average from math. The main use for averages is as a filter to smooth the data you input. The image displays a 200 period simple moving average that gives a very smooth outcome. The downside to this smoothness is that you introduce more lag. This means the average becomes less responsive to changes in price. If you take a look at the next image you will see how different the behavior of a 200 period simple moving average is when you compare it to the green 10 period average. The latter is much quicker in responding to price changes, but in turn there is a lot more "noise" in the average. There are many different types of averages that mainly vary in the impact each data point has [...]

EasyLanguage & PowerLanguage Tutorials – Lesson 01

EasyLanguage & PowerLanguage Tutorial - Lesson 01 The first steps towards Easylanguage & PowerLanguage proficiency Great, you are taking the first step towards learning to program in Multicharts and Tradestation. I am happy for you as this will be an interesting journey. This will bring up a new window. Set the study type to Indicator and click “OK”. Give the study a name of your choice. The only limitation is that the name can't be already in use by a different study. For example I will use ABC_PowerLanguage Lesson 01 as name and then click OK again. The name will be what you use later to add the study to the chart, so it helps when it displays the purpose of the study. I like using the ABC_ prefix to label the studies that I have worked on for myself or the website for example. For other work I will use different labels. This makes it easier to find something when I have to look up a study. Every study can have inputs that you can assign a default value to. For example you can use an input for the length of a moving average. The inputs for indicators and signals can be changed when you load the study on a chart. So it makes sense to have some inputs to allow a more user friendly study. When you declare an input by giving it a name and initialize it by assigning a default value, you also define the type of the input. There can be three different types: a Numeric input a String input a Boolean input i.e. a true/false input To declare an input you [...]

Easylanguage Tutorials – Lesson 0

EasyLanguage Tutorial - Lesson 0 Learning EasyLanguage as easy as ABC A new school year starts after the summer holidays here. This seems to be the perfect time to finally start something I had in mind for a long time. I wanted to create a set of Easylanguage tutorials that help users with starting to learn how to program in Multicharts and Tradestation. At least help them in understanding basic coding principles. If you already have coding experience in either of the programs these EasyLanguage tutorials will probably not be for you. The lessons will be geared towards Multicharts, as the build in PowerLanguage is more powerful than Tradestation’s EasyLanguage. At the same time what works within EasyLanguage will usually work within PowerLanguage, too. I will highlight differences in the two languages, thus making sure you can use the lessons for Tradestation, too. Tradestation and Multicharts have expanded the programming capabilities of their software a lot over the last years. Tradestation has extended EasyLanguage with object oriented components. It’s called OOEL (object oriented EasyLanguage) which allows for more complex programming. Multicharts.NET even takes it one step further as you can program in C# or VB.NET. This offers great possibilities for experienced programmers. Some brokers even offer Multicharts.NET for free. As the EasyLanguage tutorials focus on the basics (and Multicharts.NET doesn’t use EasyLanguage or Powerlanguage anyway) I will concentrate on EasyLanguage and PowerLanguage first. My goal is to create one lesson per week and I will try to have a couple of lessons ready for publishing in advance. So in case there will be little time, I still have something to publish for you. As I said I will start with basic concepts [...]

By |2017-09-04T14:46:35+00:00August 19th, 2013|Categories: EasyLanguage Tutorial|Tags: , |6 Comments

The best trading time frame

What is the best trading time frame for you? Financial trading, whether it is futures, stocks, options, currencies, exchange traded funds (ETFs) or any other instrument, is a highly competitive environment. You will compete against a broad scale of opponents. This includes individual traders, investment companies, hedge funds and banks. Needless to say that the playing field is not leveled. Not everyone can effort to spend millions each year on infrastructure alone for example. Understanding this should bring you to the conclusion that not every market style is suited for every market participant.Finding the best trading time frame will be very subjective. There will be trading time frames better suited for each market participant and some they should avoid. When a retail investor tries to get into High Frequency Trading (HFT) for example the odds are already skewed heavily against him. The time until his orders are reaching the broker via the internet already is a factor to consider. The data might also take a couple of seconds to travel from the exchange to the trader’s computer. This can easily add up to several seconds. This is a huge difference in the world of high frequency algorithmic trading, where major players are dealing with milliseconds. What can a retail trader do? To make money in this highly competitive field of trading is possible even for the retail traders, but the time horizon should be thought trough carefully. In general I would say that the smaller the time frame and the more trades you execute, the more likely there will be disadvantages working against you. Consider a trading system based on a four hour chart for example. It might take two trades a week and [...]

By |2016-11-09T13:57:23+00:00June 27th, 2013|Categories: Research Ideas|0 Comments

Why does custom programming make sense?

The benefits of custom programming If you recall the process of learning a foreign language, it takes minutes to learn the first words, but many hours to speak it fluently and probably years until it becomes almost native. “Achievement”, states Malcom Gladwell in his bestselling book “Outliers”, “is talent plus preparation”¹ and while we strongly believe that to learn a programming language is possible for everyone, it is a time consuming process nonetheless. In studies looking at excellence and mastery “the idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again […]. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.“² While it might not be necessary to have this level of expertise to develop a trading system based on your ideas, the amount of time needed in case you start from scratch with learning the language will still be substantial. In case you work with an expert, not only do you get access to this kind of expertise, but you can also put this time to use in other endeavors (more research or even better time with family and friends) and you will have the results much quicker. Most of the time in the end you will not only save time, but money as an expert can help you avoiding costly programming errors or help you in avoiding common fallacies and traps with optimizations for example. In case you already know the programming language to some extent or have done some coding for yourself, you know that something that looked like a couple of hours work can easily turn into taking days and weeks [...]

By |2017-09-04T09:40:17+00:00June 27th, 2013|Categories: Research Ideas|0 Comments
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