FFcal - Plot News indicator | Page 5 | Forex Factory

Options

Go to
Permalinks
Print Thread

Similar Threads

Request for working FFCal Expert Advisor indicator 21 replies

FFCAL Indicator 4 replies

New FFCAL Indicator 8 replies

Is there an economic indicator which is better than FFcal? 1 reply

Attachments: FFcal - Plot News indicator
Exit Attachments

FFcal - Plot News indicator

  • #81
  • May 26, 2007 7:51am May 26, 2007 7:51am
Quoting hanover

Ragster – FFcalc.EXE’s own ‘Events History’ comes pre-loaded with news events up to the beginning of May. You need to tell FFcal.EXE to download data, a week at a time, for each week after that. (This assumes that the data is available on the FF calendar for that particular week). To do this, press F5 and change the “FF calendar start date” near the top of the screen to Sunday 6 May (5/6/2007), then press Enter to process. Then press F5 again, and press the ‘+7’ button to advance the date to 13 May, and press Enter to process once again. Then repeat for 20 May. And so on. You need to do this process once for every week that you require data from the FF calendar, and also any time you want to update FFcal’s Events History with new data from FF calendar (e.g. when “Actual” values get updated during a news announcement). To see what’s in the Events History, press F9. See posts #48, 51 and (especially) 52 in this thread for more details. If you need more help, please continue to post.

David
Thanks David - it's working fine now. I guess I should read the entire post before asking you the same questions as others!

The truth is - it's like an Aladdins cave in here and I tend to quickly move on to the next shiny gem - so Kudos to you for replying to me individually and not just telling me to read the thread.

I'll not be so hasty to post next time!

Looking forward to V2.

On another note - I was thinking that it would be cool to use Plot News as a kind of bookmarking/search system. You know - there's a big news announcement tomorrow and I want to look at the previous x months results for the same news.

I know Burger King is doing sterling service providing some 1min charts in the News Trading Room - but I think it would be useful to quickly locate those same events within MT4 and do further analysis on the charts which will be there for next time I want to trade that same event.

All the info is already there in the 'objects list' of the chart - however it's search functionality is limited by the formatting of the the 'Name' field.

It's in the form:

12:30 USD M "ECI q/q" 1943

which means that sorting the 'Name' field just sorts items by time.

If the elements were in separate fields (or in a different order with 'ECI q/q' first), then we could sort by event and jump to that event by checking the 'Object' box and hitting 'Show' - making your Plot News indicator a nifty navigation/search tool too.

I know I could manually attach 'text' and accomplish the same thing - but using Plot News to do it would be instantly applicable to any chart.

Maybe there's already a quick way to locate past events and I just haven't discovered it yet...
  • #82
  • May 26, 2007 6:27pm May 26, 2007 6:27pm
I modified the indicator to capture the effect that each news event had on the price of the EUR USD

improted everythign into a spreadsheet so that we could compare them...

I posted it here http://forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=31162

The problem is that the spreadsheet is huge.. anyone have somewhere that I can post it so it can be shared...
Keep it simple stoopid....
  • #83
  • May 26, 2007 9:30pm May 26, 2007 9:30pm
Quoting Ragster
On another note - I was thinking that it would be cool to use Plot News as a kind of bookmarking/search system. You know - there's a big news announcement tomorrow and I want to look at the previous x months results for the same news.
V 1.04 will allow sorting/grouping the Event History by Date/Time, or by Currency/Event, or by Event/Currency. (V 2.00 still in pipeline).

Also, not sure if you're aware that you can restrict (filter) the events to be plotted by the text in the event description. This facility is very useful if you want to study the historical effect on prices caused by one particular type of announcement. For example, if you want to see what effects CPI had on the GBPUSD, you can type the text “CPI” into the relevant field, and only events with the text “CPI” somewhere in their description will be plotted on the chart. You can enter up to three text filters.

David
  • #84
  • May 26, 2007 9:34pm May 26, 2007 9:34pm
Version 1.04 allows sorting/grouping the Event History by Date/Time, or by Currency/Event, or by Event/Currency. (Press F9 to view the Event History). It also tidies up some inconsistencies with the function keys, and adds a couple of data entry enhancements. The '+7' (add 7 days to date) buttons have been upgraded to a full calendar selection.

If installing for the first time, you need to install the base system as per post #63 in this thread. Then/otherwise unzip the ZIP attached to this post, overwriting all files with the new version.

Again, I must point out that while I have firewalls and AVG anti-virus operating on my PC config, by downloading and running the software, you agree to do so AT YOUR OWN RISK. My config allows testing on Win-98 and Win-XP Pro only.

David
Attached File(s)
File Type: zip FFcal104.zip   676 KB | 1,146 downloads
  • #85
  • May 29, 2007 1:30am May 29, 2007 1:30am
hanover, I'm not sure if this is an error or if it's me (probably me hehe).

The problem is it seems that the first field, "No. of hours your MT4 is ahead of FF calendar", doesn't seem to have any effect on the downloaded data. So if I press F9 and go to the data, it tells me that the USD New Home sales for 5/25 was at 14:00, and this data does not change even if I change the field. I'm ET (GMT-5), my broker is GMT+1, and I'm not sure what FF's TZ is, but it doesn't seem that my settings are having any effect. At any rate, everything's 2 hours behind what it should be, except future events which seem to be correct. What's going on? I've tried this with 1.03 and 1.04.

BTW, small bug report (I'm a former SE, I know you just looove those hehe): when you click the window close 'X' in 1.04, it doesn't close the window, it goes ahead with the generation of the news.csv.
  • #86
  • Edited 5:12am May 29, 2007 4:53am | Edited 5:12am
Quoting JoshDance
The problem is it seems that the first field, "No. of hours your MT4 is ahead of FF calendar", doesn't seem to have any effect on the downloaded data. So if I press F9 and go to the data, it tells me that the USD New Home sales for 5/25 was at 14:00, and this data does not change even if I change the field. I'm ET (GMT-5), my broker is GMT+1, and I'm not sure what FF's TZ is, but it doesn't seem that my settings are having any effect. At any rate, everything's 2 hours behind what it should be, except future events which seem to be correct. What's going on? I've tried this with 1.03 and 1.04.
Josh, the process only loads one week's data from FF calendar at a time. Press F5, change the "No. of hours your MT4 is ahead of FF calendar", and the "FF calendar start date" to a specific week you want to process, and press Enter. When the process ends, press F9 to view the data, and satisfy yourself that the data for THAT WEEK is correct. You may need to experiment with the "No. of hours your MT4 is ahead of FF calendar" to get the times exactly correct for daylight saving and non-daylight saving periods. For example, my MT4 uses GMT as its TZ, and I need to enter '4' or a '5' depending on the time differential between GMT and New York (the WGET file seems to be New York time) for a given week.

The History file comes pre-loaded with data back to 1 Jan 2007, with times set to GMT (on the assumption that most MT4's use GMT as their base TZ). You can press Alt-F9 to clear out this data, if you wish, and then rebuild the History, a week at a time, going as far back as you wish. However, going back to 2006 may cause unpredictable results, as FFcal.EXE expects to find the calendar in its current HTML format, and the FF webmaster may have changed this at various points in the past.

Or, if you prefer, wait for v1.05, which I will release later today. This will include an option to rebuild the entire History, and in the process add or subtract any number of hours to the time value.

Quoting JoshDance
BTW, small bug report (I'm a former SE, I know you just looove those hehe): when you click the window close 'X' in 1.04, it doesn't close the window, it goes ahead with the generation of the news.csv.
Well spotted. I will fix this in v1.05. Hope it's not too much inconvenience to press Esc or click the Cancel button instead, in the meantime.

David
  • #87
  • May 29, 2007 10:58am May 29, 2007 10:58am
Quoting hanover
Well spotted. I will fix this in v1.05. Hope it's not too much inconvenience to press Esc or click the Cancel button instead, in the meantime.
Lol definitely no trouble David. It's a low priority next-release kind of fix. One more that I was able to reproduce was that if I put 5/20/2007 as the start date for the calendar, I get an error saying that "calend~1.php" could not be opened. If I change that to 5/21/2007, it works fine. Just a heads up.

Thanks for the great explanation and helping me to get things working properly!
  • #88
  • May 29, 2007 5:08pm May 29, 2007 5:08pm
Quoting JoshDance
One more that I was able to reproduce was that if I put 5/20/2007 as the start date for the calendar, I get an error saying that "calend~1.php" could not be opened. If I change that to 5/21/2007, it works fine.
I haven't been able to reproduce this problem on either Win-98 or Win-XP Pro. However, all it means is that the app was trying to delete a file that doesn't already exist, so it's not damaging anything. The app already has an error trap in there to cover this situation, so I can't understand why it's not working properly. Perhaps it has something to do with the way files are named on your Windows version. My version of Clarion is so outdated that it prefers the old 8 character DOS-style file names!

Given that a successful run of WGET should create a "calend~1.php" file, the error should hopefully be a once-only occurrence.

David
  • #89
  • Edited 7:08pm May 29, 2007 5:13pm | Edited 7:08pm
Version 1.05 adds an Events History rebuild facility. It also tidies up aspects of the data entry, enhances file buffering (causing the update processes to run a lot faster, especially on Win XP) and fixes the problems mentioned in posts #93 & #94.

To access the rebuild facility, press Alt-F9. You can instruct the rebuild to adjust the time for all, or some (in the date range that you specify) of the events, forward or backward by a number of hours. This can be used to bring events into sync with the time zone that your MT4 is running, without the need to re-process each FF calendar on a week-by-week basis.

The Events History data in the attached ZIP comes pre-loaded with data from 1 Jan 2007 thru 8 June 2007, and assumes that your MT4 uses GMT as its base time zone. When you unzip the upgrade, it will overwrite your existing Event History. If an adjustment is required, simply run the rebuild across the entire file. For example, if a news event is being plotted at 2pm when it should be at 4pm (i.e. 2 hours too early), enter ‘2’ into the Time Adjustment field to bring all events forward 2 hours. If a news event is being plotted at 11:30am when it should be at 8:30am (i.e. 3 hours too late), enter ‘–3’ into the Time Adjustment field to bring all events backward 3 hours.

If installing for the first time, you need to install the base system as per post #63 in this thread. Then/otherwise unzip the ZIP attached to this post (#97), overwriting all files with the new version.

Again, I must point out that while I have firewalls and AVG anti-virus operating on my PC config, by downloading and running the software, you agree to do so AT YOUR OWN RISK. My config allows testing on Win-98 and Win-XP Pro only.

David
Attached File(s)
File Type: zip FFcal105.zip   682 KB | 1,007 downloads
  • #90
  • May 29, 2007 9:29pm May 29, 2007 9:29pm
Hanover,

I am trying to get the data from jan 06 - todyy loaded into the news.csv file but no matter what I do there is a huge gap in my data. . .

PHP Code
2006.01.06 05:30;2;0;3;ALL;111110000;05:30 USA H "Nonfarm Employment Change" 1026;Act: 108K   F'cast: 215K   Prev: 215K
2006.01.06 05:30;3;0;1;ALL;111110000;05:30 USA L "Unemployment Rate" 1027;Act: 4.9%   F'cast: 5.0%   Prev: 5.0%
2006.01.06 07:00;1;0;2;ALL;111110000;07:00 CAN M "Ivey PMI" 1028;Act: 48.3   F'cast: 62.4   Prev: 65.8
2007.01.01 22:30;1;146;1;ALL;111110000;22:30 AUD L "Manufacturing PMI" 1029;Act: 52.4   F'cast:    Prev: 54.4
2007.01.02 08:55;1;142;2;ALL;111110000;08:55 EUR M "German Manufacturing PMI" 1030;Act: 59.4   F'cast: 58.3   Prev: 58.3
2006.01.06 07:00
---- Gap -----
2007.01.01 22:30

Any suggestions on why this is happening ?
Keep it simple stoopid....
  • #91
  • May 30, 2007 1:58am May 30, 2007 1:58am
Quoting Kurka Fund
I am trying to get the data from jan 06 - todyy loaded into the news.csv file but no matter what I do there is a huge gap in my data. . . Any suggestions on why this is happening ?
Kurka, are you aware that the FF calendar is only available a week at a time? Hence FFcal.EXE can only load one week at a time. So you need to run the process once for each week, i.e. for 1 Jan 2006, 8 Jan 2006, 15 Jan 2006, etc. See my comments in post #94 for more info.

A couple of other points:

1. Going back to 2006 may cause unpredictable results, as FFcal.EXE expects to find the calendar in its current HTML format, and the FF webmaster may have changed this at various points in the past.

2. Following on from this, I see that the currencies are described as UK, GER, USA, CAN, E–12, JPN etc instead of GBP, USD, CAD, EUR, JPY. This could cause problems should you try to use Plot_News to plot the events on a chart.

Having said all this, I’ve managed to download the first two weeks of Jan 2006, and as far as I can tell, all of the announcements have been loaded safely into the History. Haven’t tried to plot them on a chart.

I could add a "Number of weeks to load" parameter in v1.06: this would save having to run the process 52 times to load a year's worth of data. The file comes pre-loaded with all 2007 data to date, and I didn't anticipate that anybody would want to load events for 2006, especially considering points 1 & 2 above.

Good luck
David
  • #92
  • May 30, 2007 2:17am May 30, 2007 2:17am
I wanted to be able to pull the pricing info from last years data so that I could compare Month to like month. Jan06 to jan 07 for example. Would it be to much to ask, to post a news.csv file that contains jan 06 - current. I would really apprieciate it. I will post the spreadsheet that i am putting together with this data. very useufull info for news traders...
Keep it simple stoopid....
  • #93
  • May 30, 2007 4:27am May 30, 2007 4:27am
Quoting Kurka Fund
I wanted to be able to pull the pricing info from last years data so that I could compare Month to like month. Jan06 to jan 07 for example. Would it be to much to ask, to post a news.csv file that contains jan 06 - current. I would really apprieciate it. I will post the spreadsheet that i am putting together with this data. very useufull info for news traders...
Kurka,

Unzip the attached to get News.CSV with all news announcements between 1 Jan 2006 and 8 June 2007.

I've converted all currencies from UK to GBP etc, to maintain consistency with the 2007 naming format. GER has been changed to EUR, and I have prepended "German " to the description.

Times should be GMT, but not sure if I have adjusted the 2006 announcements' time correctly re daylight saving, hence some could be wrong by 1 hour.

Cheers
David
Attached File(s)
File Type: zip news.zip   63 KB | 937 downloads
  • #94
  • May 30, 2007 5:36am May 30, 2007 5:36am
NEW FEATURES AND OPERATIONAL NOTES

Version 1.06 allows multiple weeks’ FF calendars to be processed in a single run. Press F5, and enter the “Number of weeks’ worth of data to load”. This defaults to 1. If you ask for 2 or more weeks to be processed, WGET is called the required number of times, and then the week currently being processed is shown at the lower right of the screen. Hence you must have the “Automatic calendar load (uses WGET)” option checked ON. The process loops until the required number of weeks have been processed. Once the process has started, it can not be stopped. There is no in-built error checking if the FF calendar is unavailable (e.g. the web site is off-line), hence such a situation could potentially cause unpredictable results.

There is also a new parameter “Convert 2006 currency names”. If checked ON, this will automatically make the following conversions, while the process is running:
all to ALL
AUS to AUD
CAN to CAD
E-12 to EUR
GER to EUR (and also prepends “German ” to the description, e.g. “German PPI”)
JPN to JPY
NZ to NZD
UK to GBP
USA to USD
This is to ensure compatibility with the 2007 currency names, and hence also ensure that they generate the correct symbols when plotted on MT4 charts. The only currency symbols recognized by the Plot_News indicator are ALL, USD, CAD, EUR, GBP, CHF, JPY, AUD and NZD.

The Events History data in the attached ZIP now comes pre-loaded with data from 1 Jan 2006 thru 8 June 2007, and assumes that your MT4 uses GMT as its base time zone. When you unzip the upgrade, it will overwrite your existing Event History. If an adjustment is required, press Alt-F9 and run the rebuild (explained in post #97) across the entire file. For example, if a news event is being plotted at 2pm when it should be at 4pm (i.e. 2 hours too early), enter ‘2’ into the Time Adjustment field to bring all events forward 2 hours. If a news event is being plotted at 11:30am when it should be at 8:30am (i.e. 3 hours too late), enter ‘–3’ into the Time Adjustment field to bring all events backward 3 hours.

You can also press Alt-F9 and delete the 2006 events, if you don’t need them.


INSTALLATION

If installing for the first time, you need to install the base system as per post #63 in this thread. Then/otherwise unzip the ZIP attached to this post (#102), overwriting all files with the new version.

Again, I must point out that while I have firewalls and AVG anti-virus operating on my PC config, by downloading and running the software, you agree to do so AT YOUR OWN RISK. My config allows testing on Win-98 and Win-XP Pro only.

David
Attached File(s)
File Type: zip FFcal106.zip   804 KB | 1,473 downloads
  • #95
  • May 30, 2007 10:37am May 30, 2007 10:37am
1.06 is up and running - it's well cool.

I ran the rebuild to align the times (I'm GMT and my MT4 is GMT+1)

It looks like you are right about some times being 1hr off.

The period of 3 weeks in March and 1 week in November are the tricky parts:

DST
begins at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday 11th of March and
ends at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday 4th of November

BST
begins Sunday 25th March 2007 1am GMT until
Sunday 28th October 2007 1am GMT

During the times where the 2 are different the FF calendar will be GMT -4 instead of -5.

As if things weren't complicated enough!

Also - I'm seeing the ADP Nonfarm Employment Change from 7 March, and 3 Jan and 31 Jan appearing to be an hour later than it actually was. This is outside the above times. April and May are plotting correctly.
  • #96
  • May 30, 2007 12:13pm May 30, 2007 12:13pm
what corect brokir alows news trade?
seems they all loose for news trade.
they not alow me news trade. (flagger - no trade )
how trade news w/ corect brokir?
thank you.
  • #97
  • May 30, 2007 12:27pm May 30, 2007 12:27pm
Quoting jane
what corect brokir alows news trade?
seems they all loose for news trade.
they not alow me news trade. (flagger - no trade )
how trade news w/ corect brokir?
thank you.
Jane, this is the wrong thread to ask your question. Try here:

http://www.forexfactory.com/forumdisplay.php?f=73

Read through some things there first before asking, as what you're asking has already been answered umpteen times already.

Good luck! Be careful when trading the news!
  • #98
  • May 30, 2007 12:29pm May 30, 2007 12:29pm
ah thank you,
forgiv, pleeze.
thank you.
  • #99
  • May 30, 2007 5:27pm May 30, 2007 5:27pm
Quoting Ragster
1.06 is up and running - it's well cool..... ..... April and May are plotting correctly.
Thanks, Ragster. I agree, daylight saving is a real headache.

If we use WGET to get the "raw" FF calendar data, then I believe the supplied data is New York time. But when NY moves into DST, I don't know whether these values are adjusted by an hour or not.

In case Clarion/WGET wasn't compatible on some PC configs, FFcal.EXE allows processing from a manually saved FF calendar (calendar.php.htm). But if this option is used, the saved data is adjusted by the user's FF calendar "Date and Time options".

On top of all this (as you point out), different users are running versions of MT4 based on different time zones.

For the 2007 calendar, I attempted to ascertain news announcement times by looking for the price spikes on the charts, and then seeing where the symbols were being plotted relative to these. Then I went back and made what I hoped were the correct adjustments.

However, Kurka seemed to want the 2006 data ASAP, so I simply used WGET with an adjustment factor of +4. This effectively makes the assumption that New York is always 4 hours behind GMT, which of course is not the case. So some of the 2006 times will almost certainly be incorrect.

Attempting to match locations of the plotted symbols against price spikes, is a tedious and inaccurate way to get the times correct. If there's an easier way of achieving this, I'm definitely open to suggestions.

In the meantime...... Given that every user's MT4 time zone is potentially different, I simply leave it to each user to use the rebuild facility (press Alt-F9) to shift event times however they please, between whatever date ranges they please. It's also possible to edit individual Event History items via the view/edit facility (press F9).

David
  • #100
  • Jun 1, 2007 9:28pm Jun 1, 2007 9:28pm
Version 1.07 incorporates:

a) performance enhancements to the Events History rebuild (Alt-F9);

b) options to include/exclude untimed (e.g. “All day”, “Tentative”) events and/or unvalued (no Actual, Forecast or Previous values, e.g. “…speaks”, “…Minutes”) events from being downloaded from the FF calendar;

c) a complete update of the operating instructions (download the doc files below).

If installing for the first time, you need to:
1) install the base system as per post #63 in this thread; then
2) upgrade to version 1.06, by following the instructions in post #102; then
3) unzip the ZIP attached to this post (#108), overwriting the existing FFcal.EXE file.

If you already have v1.06 installed, you need only perform step (3). The ZIP below contains only the FFcal.EXE file, so you won’t overwrite any changes you've made to your Events History.

Again, I must point out that while I have firewalls and AVG anti-virus operating on my PC config, by downloading and running the software, you agree to do so AT YOUR OWN RISK. My config allows testing on Win-98 and Win-XP Pro only.

David
Attached File(s)
File Type: zip ffcal107.zip   604 KB | 1,340 downloads
File Type: doc FF calendar converter - instructions.doc   612 KB | 1,661 downloads
File Type: doc Plot_News indicator - instructions.doc   522 KB | 2,015 downloads
1 trader viewing now