PYenner

Walter For the benefit of people coming from forex who have not traded YM before.. What is the "pip margin" for YM?

There may be a problem with forex data feed from AsiaPacific market, my mm (CMC Australia) has problem with throttling on AUD and JPY pairs. Swiss area feed is normal, CMC's prices are running 2 to 5 pips behind swiss prices and very sluggish. CMC has also had server drop outs for a few days which has never happened in the previous year. The problem might be bigger than just NT maybe?

Thank you Unicorn

Still searching, nothing is clean enough, as you say- weak and maybe, needs too much thinking and leaves too much uncertainty. Hoping volume may help if it is used in a less clumsy way, some interesting thoughts but vague still. With Chimp3_1 it can help a bit to add level lines somewhere between + 0.3 to +0.5 and -0.3 to -0.5 to help distinquish the more important peaks from the less important peaks, longer period charts may need different marker levels than the shorter period charts.

Unicorn Still vague thinking on that, I feel something should be possible but unsure where to look. Either momentum or momentum/volume gives a clear spike at the start of a ladder but neither gives a clear picture of progressive fatique toward the end of a ladder. Looked at OBV, found good and bad in that. Still need to look inside the code of conventional indicators to see how they might be improved or exploited. My education on conventional indicators is zero, I learn only what I need in order to do the job at hand. But that means my "mental library" is running near empty. Vague thoughts about using a reciprocal to invert a near zero reading on Chimp3-1 so there would be a second line that is near 1 when the Chimp3_1 line is near zero, but its only questioning, nothing clear. Volume alone might give more information if it is dissected in greater detail, OBV looks to be primative, there are probably more intelligent versions than obv in use but don't recall what they were called. Also wondering if the narrowing of the "stochastic band" might be useful. The number I am thinking of is HHV-LLV, this may get smaller as a trend weakens but there is the complication that the trend sometimes reverses without bothering to get exhausted first. HHV-LLV might not be "smart" enough, it might need to be made more sensitive to weakening of the current trend and kept less sensitive to pullback against that trend. It might also be possible to run one stochastic on the plus stream and another on the minus stream and gain something useful about changing trend strengths from comparing the (HHV-LLV) numbers for plus and minus streams. Off topic but the thought popped up that while signal/(HHV-LLV) works well for vma, an alternative like (signal -(HHV-LLV)/2)/(HHV-LLV) might give an axis line with less vma steps in it??? There are also aspects of vidya that might still be explored for getting axis lines or whatever, I think you mentioned stochastic(rsi) as an interesting one and I need to look into those suggestions. There are a number of swing indicators that might be turned into something far more general purpose if they could be adapted to work with trends better, made an attempt at one six months ago but went off in a different direction soon after. Never used tick charts before so waiting for Walter to introduce his tick tactics so I waste less time finding out what works for the trader. An advanced picture may depend on the access a platform gives to the native tick feed before it has been "interpreted" by the platform. A "full" picture needs access to enough chart pairs to analyse the currencies that are being traded to move the prices in the current chart. This is possible in the majors where the pairs are available, but currently not possible with AUD due to lack of other AUD pairs. This "currency" analysis would probably give the clearest exhaustion signal there is but I am only part way into understanding it and to understanding how tier1 trading actually operates. Can't find published info on how the trading system was designed so having to Sherlock Holmes my way towards understanding. There is no pot of gold here, the market remains devious at all levels of analysis, but the more tools you have to work with the better and the beauty of currency analysis is that it is in hard number real time prices, nothing vague about the numbers, only the tactical thinking behind them that remains the big challenge. Its going to be clumsy steps at first but hope to gain some focus or direction from them. After looking inside the stages of snipers T3 I got a surprise at how little lag it produced, had me wondering if dema, tema, T3 etc should be tried in place of emas with the adxvma but they already follow a ladder quite well so the only "improvement" might be in them breaking out of HE earlier and not sure if that would be an improvement or make things worse. Off topic again, but in electronics there are a host of filters suited to different purposes and I am starting to find analogies in ema, dema etc, T3 looks seriously interesting for use in smoothing momentum indicators so that less price gets added into the momentum signal. This class of smoothing is known as zero phase shift or mimimal phase shift in electronics and T3 looks to be along the lines of a minimal phase shift filter so it may have uses for preserving "signal fidelity". Doesn't pay to ask what I'm thinking because a ton of junk is likely to tumble out... Welcome to the confusion club... Very impressed with NT documentation so far, promising. Cheers

Have been using Chimp3_1 on 1min and 5min, scalping out on momentum peaks. Don't know if it would add anything to the 15min or 30min picture, one way to find out. It would also help to have an exhaustion meter that tells you how long this ladder is going to last...

Sundowner Great to hear its working for you. When I put in enough chart time to get the feel of the market it works well for me too. If I understood MT4 better it might be easy enough to port things back to MT4 so maybe it will happen, but for the moment tools seem to be available in NT without having to hunt all over for them, so its about saving time and sanity. With Sparrow being so capable it might leave me free to go searching in new directions without slowing down overall progress. His systematic approach is good to see. There are still some MT4 things that may need exploring like fourier transforms and cluster indicators which may not have got started yet on other platforms. Time will tell... Cheers

Hi Bertg Most MT4 accounts say they expire but then they don't. Some suppliers play the disconnect and repaint the chart trick in MT4 too. But you can run multiple accounts thru one MT4 platform and slowly sort out which provider is most reliable.

I also need to see the price pattern but those rainbows make for great screen art... Bemac used VImax=0.4 and I made the mistake of discarding it thinking it was a "nasty". Sometimes squares or mutipliers are appropriate to the maths and sometimes + or - offsets. So the sq and sq root stuff was just to see if there were other gains to be found like VImax=0.4 but so far nothing much. All of the code has been experimental with constant bug fixes, it would be nice to get towards a finished product and no more fixes. One of the problems with MT4 was the compiler really only does syntax checks, no real debugging or compiling and it looks like NT has a real compiler and the code runs a lot faster as well. With porting the MT4 stuff, it would be good to get back to using the ema function so that "ema_periods" has a standard meaning. I often took shortcuts with the hand coded emas using an approximate "ema_periods" which confuses the picture. And Sparrow, you are seriously fast coder

Blu I have a foot in both camps now and you know I like MT4 a lot but the diy indicator stuff seriously sucks and lack of English documentation is a major part of the problem. There are some seriously good looking MT4 things coming out of Russia, like fast fourier transforms but again, no english versions, :doh: I seem to be the only twit trying to program in MT4. I'm not a whiz bang programmer, just a hacker, slow poke whatever. I could surely have used some company from someone who knew something about MT4. But I don't even know how many people even want to stick with MT4. I do want to look at volume and volume based charts. So that means either NT or excel. Bought excel to do analysis, havn't used it yet. Just got NT demo going, I think:confused: At least it has better documentation than MT4 at first glance. I don't think Sparrow will need help from me, I'm too slow. So, maybe I can take a holiday anyway. I would be happy to see the bulk of the development being done on NT or whatever fills the need. I lost a week chasing around for an answer to the array shortage, googling programs to see how to do subroutines etc basic stuff but where is it documented? Cant be repeating overheads like that. If it can't be done in MT4 in a realistic "competitive" fashion, then I'm inclined to vote with my feet and move to NT or excel. Cheers.

CCI_T3_2.mq4 This time.. I am trying to avoid having MT4 diseases passed on to other platforms. Sniper ran out of arrays so he cheated and used variables for the T3 ema's. Result was that it malfunctions on live ticks, so he used a repaint step to correct the bars, but not the ticks. If Sniper is going to be ported to other platforms then it has to use arrays for the emas. But then MT4 is unable to do arrays plus histo bars. One option is to do without histo bars on MT4. This is the other option, drop e6 which is the slowest of the ema's. Result is a bit more leading than sniper and a bit more noise. But if b=0.4 is used (default is 0.618) then you get something close to sniper but with no MT4 foulups to be passed on to other platforms. It also won't be exactly T3 anymore... so you don't exactly win. Whatever goes down, I hope other platforms will stick to using arrays so that the tick problem does not spread beyond MT4. Another option would be to leave the MT4 version of sniper as it is, with tick problems, but just make sure that other platforms do it properly with arrays. So, this version has arrays, but with e6 deleted in order to have histo bars. If other people see other options then now might be a time to sort it out. Whatever Cheers all. CCI_T3_2.mq4

Looks like I didn't get it right... Got the line sequence mixed up somehow. So I will pull the attachment and have another go. Back to the drawing board... Cheers

CCI_T3_1.mq4 This is a version of Sniper using arrays for e1 to e6 instead of variables. It confirms that arrays should have been used for the emas although the difference will only show up on live ticks. This left the MT4 version without enough arrays to show the histogram lines, so what you get instead is a rainbow sequence of lines showing how the cci input signal gets progressively smoothed and delayed by the emas. If NT has only 7 arrays then it looks like some of the later emas might be omitted, freeing up enough arrays to allow use of histo bars, same goes for an MT4 version, but is a more leading version of Sniper needed as it will also have more noise? Judge from the rainbow lines... Black line is the regular Sniper output. Red line is e1 input, yellow is e2 etc thru to black. If Sniper is going to get ported to other platforms, it might be worth going for arrays to guarantee stability on ticks, but reducing the number of arrays so that the common platforms can all still do histo bars.

That might be the best idea yes.

Sparrow The MT4 version of sniper malfunctions on live ticks. Sniper ran into the 8 array limit that MT4 imposes so he used variables for e1 to e6 (I think thats it) when he should have used arrays e1 etc. Without arrays it does bar by bar okay but does not handle life ticks. I think he used a repaint loop to correct the bar data. The live tick problem showed up when I removed the repaint step. I think if you use arrays for e1 etc as for normal emas, it should fix the live tick problem and remove the need to repaint the most recent bar. I still need to get past the 8 array limit before I can fix it in MT4. Good luck

That was one of the reasons MT4 vma1 could not use Wilders or even the ema function, the ema would have ended up in the template file along with the fantail lines. Instead the ema's were done using up the indicator arrays that are limited to 8 in total. Use 6 emas and you can't do an oscillator unless you leave out the two Histo bars. It gets that sick dude. Its not software its knobbleware. There are ways around most of the knobbles but they are poorly documented or not documented at all and with even the most basic stuff there is this crazy treasure hunt you have to go on to maybe find out what they don't tell you. I don't have time for never ending runarounds. Again sorry for tuntrums.

Thanks Unicorn and you are right, the stochastic is external to the ADX code. So much for working from swiss cheese memory. That also explains why there were two normalization divisions, seemed like overkill. I have used a lazy version of ema weighting that differs slightly from standard "ema_periods" there will be a conversion for it but I have not bothered working it out. So thats one more complication. A minor quibble regarding describing say Maji's Vidya as being based on price eg Maji = vidya(stochastic(price)) The input is actually delta price over delta time, aka momentum in pips/min for a 1min chart. so Maji = vidya(stochastic(momentum)) might be dimensionally more sound. But then the normalization makes it dimensionless, more like a momentum index or ratio unless that is a contradiction in terms, arghh. Dude, there is only one answer here, you take over the MT4 programming and let me get a holiday, a long one, a very long one... As far as the maths goes I would much rather be tracking the dimensional content, x% momentum, y% price etc so I know for real just what it is telling me. There seems little point in determining that it is 100% true to formula while the formula does not also tell you what the quantity is that is being displayed. Your car speedo is in miles/hr or ks/hr, what use would a speedo be if it mixed distance in with speed the same way a "momentum" indicator mixes price in with momentum. Something tells me that there should be a way to remove the price content that is inserted by smoothing and get you back closer to pure momentum. There is too much "hubble bubble" ignorance and not enough science in indicator signals. Also in MT4 some programs repaint the most recent bar to correct for missed ticks. The ema function is one that has to be run in a repaint loop. Their internal functions are a mix of repainting and non repainting loops. Even the Tardis could not do a reliable job of comparing apples1 with apples2 to check for errors, MT4 does not have a reliable time basis, some programs repaint more than one bar. The comparison you suggest is still possible, constructive and sensible, full stop. Equally, until dimensional analysis accompanies it you can still not quantify and qualify what the indicator displays, so it might as well be called shoes sizes for elephants as momentum, it is neither, it is unknown and unscientific. The maths is not in contact with reality and that makes it more of a silly mind game than a tool, fools paradise. Forgive the frustration. I am currently running 5 momentum oscillators and 4 of them are a heap of you know what. I can't seem to face MT4 programming at the moment, possibly because it looks like it cant go where I need to go, possibly because so much is unreliable and undocumented that 80% of my time gets wasted by it, the reconstituted market feed makes a joke of fine tuning anything, I am seeing ticks being bundled and delayed for 30 secs or longer, during that time your indicator shows you no change. There are signs that the frustration could be terminal. The subroutines or diy function calls that you take for granted are not available within MT4 indicator programs, looks like you have to #define functions and do them on something like an include file. Of course its not documented, you have to find other proggies to copy and go search a forum for a day. The last week has been wasted in just this way, the programs are written in russian and there are no english versions of them. It is possible I have had a gutfull of the MT4 runaround. Been swollowing too much crud for too long with MT4. Sorry all for the tantrum. I'm taking some time out and it might be permanent as far as MT4 goes.

Walter Do you know of any free forex platforms or charting packages that have proper tick charts? They would be the alternative to excel for Volume work.

Unicorn Bear with me please on some questions on the difference between what is said and what is intended. In lamely describing the third and final stage of the ADX as the "ADX_Bars" thing, I was referring to the output = input/(HHV-LLV) stage which you appear to descibe as Stochastic (input) = input/(HHV-LLV)... (including the way HHV and LLV are obtained)... and I expect you are correct. Now where you describe Bemacs vma as stochastic_adx = stoch (adx (adx_periods), stoch_periods) you appear to have mistaken the stochastic within the ADX to be a secondary external and additional stochastic. Bemac used a straight copy and paste of the VT code for an ADX and changed only the final smoothing ema into a Vidya ama. He did not add a secondary stochastic. So I would attempt to describe his vma as vma = viya(adx) If you go into the input details, then ema_periods would apply to smoothing and ADX_Bars would apply to the internal stochastic, meaning ADX_Bars has the same meaning as stoch_periods. As I read your code, you are applying a secondary stochastic right after the ADX's internal stochastic. This would likely result in a stronger horizontal, but it also imposes a double time delay from having the ADX's ema smoothing between the two stochastics, then a similar delay from the final vidya ama. Now we get to the part about what did Chande mean but not say. You take stochastic_adx to mean an adx (complete with internal stochastic) followed by a secondary stochastic, I hesitate on that step. So where Chande describes "abs(cmo) is very close to adx" is he meaning "like an adx but without needing an internal stochastic to get the result". So he then refers to ordinary adx as stochastic_adx. Worse, there has been plenty of evolution in adx's, so ??? It seems to me that Bemacs vma = viya(adx) and again the vidya is internal to the ADX, meaning it replaces the normal output ema with a vidya ama and there are no additions external to the adx, its an adx with ama output smoothing. Some early vma versions used something like an ema of an ama but that is another story. A result similar to using two stochastics can probably be obtained from vma6 with the "VI squared" option turned on, but again it makes for later laddering not just a stronger horizontal. I am uncertain if the vma1 version you are using has a straight ama output or one of the "ema of ama" outputs. It was a porting scramble back then too. If I appear to be dragging my feet it is partly because I am uncertain whether things are going forward or round in circles. Sorry to make questions.. Wheres that club again, :crap: PYenner

Too soon for a volume thread and will probably have to test out forex volume on excel before there is any chance of saying if it is any good compared to real volume. MT4 has many hidden features, but unless one turns up that gives better access to the tick data, then it has to be studied in excel.

Not yet but it looks like I am going to find out. You are going to make me "indicator literate" if you keep this up. Getting the picture, wheres a brick wall for me to bang my head on? Looks like Snipers T3 CCI needs to be recoded since it looks to be needed. That needs one more array than MT4 allows, so will have to find out how to get extra arrays for the first time and find out the hard way what the tricks and traps are with those. Scuse me :crap: Midas is calling me, so I try OBV, turns out to be hopelessly primative. Find a bar with H-L=39 and volume=25, impossible, seriously comforting, NOT. Scuse me :crap: 5min OBV contradicts 1min OBV so price is leaking into those suckers. Scuse me :crap: You know how it goes...

Unicorn Thank you. Mathematicians think in concepts and speak in shorthand. So while I sort of understand rsi(n), I find myself needing examples. If I asked two people to walk around the world and one went around the equator and one went around the poles, they would both have done what I said but neither would know if it was what I intended, but didn't say. Ditto with stochastic_adx. But if abs(cmo) is very close to adx then maybe it should be tried in place of adx for vma lines? Yes there are many variables and Bemac gets the Nobel Prize until we know any better. Cheers PYenner

Sparrow Thank you. You see it the same way I do. Thanks for quick answer. Bruce

Sparrow Thank you, it looks like you are right but I'm not going to mess with it for now. Users of xpMA be warned. Sparrow, if you are also familiar with T3 this might be a simple question for you, if not just ignore it because I'm being lazy and looking for a quick fix. I suspect that T3 was intended to use a sequence of ema's but a version I am looking at has used a variable where an array should have been used if ema's were the intended result. The difference is that arrays will work fine on both bars and ticks, but a variable will malfunction on live ticks. This is what the code using variables looks like and cci is supposed to end up holding a T3 version of a cci input signal. Would e1, e2 etc make more sense...? W1 and W2 weightings are ema type weightings eg (n-1) and n. for(int i = Bars - 1; i >= 0; i--) { cci = iCCI(NULL, 0, CCI_Period, PRICE_TYPICAL, i); e1 = w1*cci + w2*e1; e2 = w1*e1 + w2*e2; e3 = w1*e2 + w2*e3; e4 = w1*e3 + w2*e4; e5 = w1*e4 + w2*e5; e6 = w1*e5 + w2*e6; cci = c1*e6 + c2*e5 + c3*e4 + c4*e3; I am new to just about everything so I will lean on an experienced shoulder if I can. Don't bust a gut on it, just answer if its obvious to you. Cheers Lazy PYenner

Vidya3.mq4 This vidya was ported from the VT version by Amritend Maji (Maji). The settings were for 5min chart. Seemed to get the thumbs up for matching VT charts. Chande invented this too, but there are variations around and uncertainty about which are true to Chande. xpMA_v2.mq4 Universal xpMA by Codersguru. Change MA_Type to get: 0 Simple moving average, 1 Exponential moving average, 2 Smoothed moving average, 3 Linear weighted moving average. 4 Double Exponential Moving Average. 5 Triple Exponential Moving Average. 6 T3 Moving Average. 7 Jurik Moving Average. Vidya3.mq4 xpMA_v2.mq4