short nq, short ym.. and again..

two trades right after the open.

the first one was here as a speculation for a breakdown. the entry was quite aggressive and the risk of the trade was not properly calculated before triggering.

 i assumed the price would slide down really quickly, but it did not happen. it wen up so here i closed the trade in a loss of cca 250 usd

good point on this trade was that i jump out really quickly, without any hesitation. these are situations that need to reverse immediately and if they dont, i get out.

another trade was one or two minutes after the first one.

here i am short at dow jones - opening 4 contracts as well as in the previous one but the last on was not filled. i assumed the price should not go above high where i would close the whole position

 here is the exit. in fixed trade management. with only three contracts cca +250 so i zeroed out the previous loss.

 these are two examples of a very strict risk/trade management. i play any russian roulette here. i only execute, without any emotion

here i was ready to open aanother short at ym again, but i waited the price to tick little bit higher so that i could place my stoploss into the safe area above high easily..

yet, it did not go any higher, so the drop was without me...

nq long

this was probably the best entry in this week. the boogie-woogie studies under the main chart are my acsil based subgraphs. they are amazingly strange so far, like spoiled kids, not doing what they are supposed to do ..

ex-it

pretty freaking sweet.. 

+ 450 usd/one trade

sierra chart acsil: couple of tips for adressing data from other charts

when it comes to acsil programming, sometimes you can get stuck in one place for a long time just because a simple tiny detail that you cannot solve out.

for me it was problems connected with setting up the size of arrays in overlaid charts. in sierra chart´s acsil libraries there are couple of functions for addressing the values of a different chart, but now matter which way i tried, it never worked out well.

i was able to transfer the data from other charts into my primary chart, but the values at a particular index were incorrect.

the reason was that the number of indexes in the arrays from other charts was not the same as the number of indexes in the primary one.

it sounds simple, and sierra chart support describes it in their documentation, but because i am a complete computer idiot, i was unable to get it done.

now i have finally fixed it so here i will give a couple of tips on how to do it.

first of all, a brief introduction.

why do we need to get the values of another chart, anyway?

simple example.

lets say u have found a trend pattern, but you want to open a trade only when tick nyse is above zero. for this, you need to get THE CORRECT value of tick nyse at the time (meaning at the current index) of the planned entry.

if tick nyse at the current index will be below zero, you will filter out the signal and no position will be opened, if it will be above, you will open. easy enough.

the problem is that the tick nyse starts at 8:30 and ends at 15:00

us indexes (YM, NQ, ES..) starts at 8:30 and ends at 15:15

thus it is obvious the number of indexes (the number of candlesticks) is different. and that is a big problem. if you wanna transfer the arrays (for example highs and lows) of tick nyse into the es chart and get the values for a particular candlestick at es, the values will be incorrect.

how to solve it?

easily

the first thing you should do in such a case is to re-set up the trading hours. normally i have trading hours in my charts like this because US indexes end at 15:15

you have to set the trading hours according to the chart that has less number of candlesticks (in this case it is tick nyse). so it should finish at 15:00

after that, it is important to set the linking with all the other charts (if u have any) so that you are sure the number of indexes will be the same for each array of each chart.

this is super important if you work with more charts that just two (just like me) and want to address the values of their arrays for computing correlations (just like me)

so this is the basic setting for working with an array of any other chart in the same chartbook. this should be used as defaults, otherwise, the values will never be correct.

after that, you have to choose which way to address the values of other charts.

i use acsil´s graphdata object which is implemented in sierra chart and works pretty fine, but there are a couple of other ways to do it (for example using overlay study and addressing the values of the overlaid chart as a subgraph).

anyhow, the code for getting high, low, close arrays from three different charts can look like this:

this is i would say the kernel for whatever you need when it comes to getting correct values from a particular chart. the code is pretty easy and simple, and the values that you get can be used in the same way as the values of the primary chart (eg. sc.low[sc.index], sc.high[sc.index] etc..)

pretty straightforward..

another sierra chart acsil study

i have been currently working on another acsil study which will measure intermarket divergence and filter out some trades in case the markets are too dis-correlated.

this is going to be quite a useful study which i plan to implement into all the automatic trading system. i use correlations a lot in my discretional trading and finaly i have found a way how to solve it programmatically.