FFcal - Plot News indicator

Hi Arnold,

My responses in blue typeface.

Seasons greetings,
David

Just wanted to let you know I am so pleased with Plot_News. Once initial confusion of how to use it is surmounted (It's really as simple as it's possible to make it.) it only needs to be gone into once-a-week.

The software gives a feeling of substantial reliable functionality - which must come from years as a programmer - unlike some software associated with MT4, where you get situations like having to always reset the line size to avoid obstructive, elephantine indicator. Love clicking the desktop ikon, pressing F5, and watching Plot_News do its thing.

It's amazing that all these thing are free. vHands, too, is proving indispensible. Though not so smooth to run and use as Plot_News. None is, in my experience. Finally, am finally able to avoid the painful moments of gawking at the chart wondering "What Was That?" (That is, if I remember to turn on the indicator. ((Have not failed to lately.)) Am still writing each pertinent item down religiously every morning before Moscow open, and between that and the Plot_News dots, disaster is avoided.



Seasons Greetings,

Bruce,
Dec. 25, Pirna, Germany
(Not too far from Hannover)

Hi Bruce,

Many thanks for your words of encouragement.

You're correct when you say that it's necessary to run the update on a weekly basis. Perhaps keep in mind, though, that sometimes news events get added to FF calendar, or rescheduled, while the week is in progress. I also run the update following news events, because I'm curious to obtain the "Actual" value from the announcement, and see what effect it had on price movement.

I've tried to make the software as easy to install and use as possible, without compsomising too much on the functionality. I'm afraid there will always be some kind of trade-off between the two, i.e. the more functions and features there are, the more knowledge required to use them all. I'm always open to suggestions for improvements.

Seasons greetings to you also. I wish you health, happiness and profitable trading in 2008.

David

Sir,
Thanks David for sharing this knowledge,It worked out so very well this time on my computer.
God Bless You.
Best regards.
Arnold

Hi Hanover,

I think I did what the instructions say, but at the end, after adding the indicator, I get the fallowing error on MT4 -

2008.01.17 20:44:53 Plot_News EURUSD,M30: object name passed to ObjectDelete function cannot be an uninitialized or empty string.

Do you know what can it be ? the csv was created and has data.

????

BR

Dani M

Hi Dani,

I've not seen this error message before. I'll PM you my e-mail address. Please e-mail me the News.CSV file and I'll investigate further. Somehow I think there might be something wrong with the format of the file.

David

Hi Dani,

I got your e-mail and downloaded your news.csv file, but haven't been able to obtain this error message. Everything works fine on my computer. I checked the Experts and Journal tabs and there were no error messages. So if there's nothing wrong with the news.csv file, then the problem must lie with one of: Plot_News.MQ4, MT4 or Windows.

You might like to try the following:

1. Delete the Plot_News indicator from your MT4 chart(s).
2. Re-copy the Plot_News.MQ4 and Plot_News.EX4 indicator files to folder c:\program files\<mt4>\experts\indicators
overwiting the previous versions.
3. Exit MT4, reboot your computer, and then reload MT4.
4. Re-attach the Plot_News indicator to your MT4 chart(s).

As far as I know, nobody else has been getting this error. I wonder if there's something different or unusual about your MT4, or your Windows. What version of Windows are you running?

Try the above, and if it doesn't fix the problem, post back here, and we'll try something else (although I'm fast running out of ideas).

David

Hanover,

I have used the Plot_News indicator for some time with considerable success. I mean, not my trading, but was always able to get Plot_News to work. Now when I open the ffcal.exe and press F5 it shows a different path: c:\\clarion5\apps\bds\forex\news.cvs. And when I go to change it to one of the old paths - since I have two platforms - the error message "Path not found" comes up on trying to run the program. If you say "Ignore" it does the same thing. And finally say it's necessary to close.
What could this be?
I'll never be able to survive writing all the news down every morning again!

Bruce

NOT TO WORRY,
Had the path written wrong. Had two backslashes instead of one after "c:".
That took a while to figure out. But what makes me wonder - Was just explaining to someone how to install FFcal on their computer. - is it's not installed on mine. Is it a program? How does it work if it's not a program?!? It seems to work very nicely...

B.

Hi Bruce,

Sorry about the delay in replying. I just noticed your posts now.

Glad to hear that you've got the path correct now. Microsoft Windows is very pedantic about backslashes, punctuation, spelling, number of spaces, etc. If the path you type doesn't exactly match one that already exists, you'll get the "Path not found" error.

FFcal.EXE is a program. I wrote it using a little known programming language called Clarion. I don't do much in the way of programming these days, so it's hard for me to justify spending the $2000 (or $3000, or whatever is might be) to upgrade my clunky old version of Clarion, which I purchased back in 1997. Like most programming development systems, Clarion compiles the source code into an executable file, FFcal.EXE in this case. So you can just click on the icon and the program runs, much like any other Windows application.

The Plot_News.MQ4 indicator is simply an MT4 indicator that gets news data from the News.CSV file (which was put there by FFcal.EXE) and draws the relevant Wingding objects (the little numbered circles) on your MT4 charts.

David

What your talking about is on the very edge of my understaning of computers mostly gained from MT4, but at the risk of sounding dumb: so the program is stored on the desktop instead of on Program Files, right? Then it's not necessary to have a program located in any particular place on the computer.
Thanks for all the monitoring and responses. May lose my internet connection for a while now, but will check back. Can't imagine life now without forex.

B.

Bruce, you can store and run a program (like FFcal.EXE) in any folder on your computer. The desktop is actually just another folder (it's contents are stored somewhere under the 'Windows' folder, at least it did in Win98 and earlier versions). Whatever files are in the Desktop folder appear on your desktop.

You can also have a program stored in any folder, and then have a link (shortcut) to it in another folder (including the desktop). A shortcut is kind of like a pointer to the original program. Then when you double-click the shortcut, Windows will link to the program and run it.

Hope this explains,

David

my csv can't update the data after 7 April in the news.csv. I saw there is an update in FFcal.exe ...yet can't see any update under C:\Program Files\BROKERS\expert\files\news.csv

anyone still using this indicator?

Hi David,

I got problem with my local +7.
It's not only with csv file, but also when I upload it in MT4, time goes 4 hours away from what I expected.

May you give me a hand please?
Thanks.

Soul, if I understand you correctly, when you press F9 in FFcal.EXE, you can see the news events, but they are not being output to news.csv.

This means that the parameters in the lower half of the screen (see blue area below) might need adjusting. If there is absolutely nothing appearing after April 7, then it's probably the date range (see red area below).

Does extending the date range fix your problem? I have data being output to news.csv after April 7 here without a problem.

David

Hi Jodie,

There are two parameters in FFcal.EXE that might need to be adjusted.

Download the attached XLS.

1. Calculate how many hours your broker's MT4 time is ahead of GMT.
a) To find out what the current time in MT4 is, press Ctrl-M to bring up the Market Watch window. Right click in this area and make sure that the "Time" option is checked on. Provided that the market is open, this will show you the time of the last quote, i.e. MT4's local time.
b) To find out GMT, go here:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=29
(The time in Bamako is always exactly GMT+0).

For example, if your MT4 Market Watch is showing 11:05 am, and the time in Bamako is 9:05 am, then MT4 is 2 hours ahead of GMT, i.e. GMT+2. Hence you would type '2' into cell E6 of the XLS (see the green oval in the image below).

2. Calculate how many hours your local time is ahead of GMT. Check your computer clock to get your local time, and calculate how many hours ahead of Bamako it is. For example, if your computer is showing 16:05, and the time in Bamako is 9:05, then you are 7 hours ahead of Bamako, i.e. GMT+7. Hence you would enter '7' into cell I6 of the XLS (see the orange oval in the image below). [Note: the 12 shown in the image below relates to New Zealand time, which is where I live].

3. Run FFcal.EXE and type the numbers shown in the blue and red ovals in the XLS into the input fields shown in the diagram below. Then click 'OK'.

4. Edit or re-attach the Plot_News indicator to your MT4 charts, and the times shown on the news events in your MT4 charts should now be correct.

Hope this helps. Please post again if you have questions.

David

Edit: for another possible alternative, see my post #270 below.

Hi David,

Someone asked if folks are still using this tool, and the answer in an emphatic "yes!" I love having this on my chart and consider it extremely helpful. IMHO, I think every Forex trader should use it.

I happen to watch an M1 chart and always check it before taking a trade, so I just add the Plot_News indicator to that one chart. If I wanted to, I could of course add it to more charts but I find one is usually sufficient.

That said, I still have some suggestions to improve this tool...

1. Please adjust the news-arrow positions (in particular, future arrows) every time a new bar is formed.

The Problem:
When I first add Plot_News to my M1 chart, the arrows for past news events are just fine, as they appear just below the minute bar when the news occurred. (Sometimes the past arrows appear on top of the bar, but I'm not too bothered by that).

However, for future news-arrows, they are placed near the bid price that existed when I added Plot_News to my chart (or when I restarted MT4). Since price moves considerably on M1 charts, the *future* news arrows are often out of range and therefore not visible on my current chart unless I manually squish the bars (expand the vertical range). This defeats the purpose if I can't see the news-arrows before news happens!

My workaround is that I always have MetaEditor up and running, and I "Recompile" Plot_News several times a day, and when I do that, the future news arrows adjust and appear close to the current bid price. (Past arrows also adjust and move closer to the completed news bar). The drag is I have to remember to do this Recompile step.

The solution is simply to have Plot_News readjust the vertical placement of future news-arrows every time a new bar is created. Can you please make this enhancement to improve this very useful tool?


2. David, the time calculations drove me crazy in the beginning. Even when I read your recent posts about setting the time, I'm still confused. The terminology is ambiguous, and if you ask me, this is the primary difficulty people run in to when trying to adopt this great tool! Many will just give up which is unfortunate. As for me, I ended up making guesses and then by trial-and-error, once I got the news arrows lined up with my MT4, I have left the two time settings alone. It seems to me that if you improve this one area, a lot more users will be successful with setting the time offsets by themselves, instead of either asking you, or giving up completely.


Problems:
a. Your reference point swaps position in your two time questions. The first asks:
"No. of hours your MT4 is ahead of FF calendar"
The second question asks:
"No. of hours your local time is ahead of your MT4 time"

The point in common is "MT4", yet you've swapped positions in your questions! It's already confusing enough to think about world timezones without swapping your point of reference.

I would suggest to use one reference point, and I *think* I would suggest to use "NY Time", regardless of standard or daylight time. Why is "local" time even relevant?? The source of the news is FF calendar, which you know is NY US Eastern, and the destination is the MT4 chart, so why not ask just one question?? (see suggestions below)


b. The use of the word "ahead", while technically correct, is a challenge to think about. If I'm in London, how many hours am I ahead of New York? Let's see... um, the sun rises in London first so it's earlier in New York, so they're actually ahead of me by, um, 5 hours, so I guess it's 5... no wait, "-5". Oh but is it DST there but not here? Maybe it's "-6"...??? Which way is "ahead" anyway??! lol

c. You reference "... ahead of FF calendar", but there is no one precise answer as to what that is! On FF calendar, we have a choice to set our personal timezone associated with our login. If I go to the FF calendar and am logged out, then it displays US Eastern time (standard or daylight, whichever is in effect). If I login, then it displays whatever I have told it to display. The site suggests that users align it with their local time, but I have found it easier to set it to my main MT4 broker time. (I actually wish FF had two columns for time for which I could set one for MT4, the other for local time).

So... your reference point is a moving target for users. This is confusing.

d. Honestly I'm unsure how standard vs. daylight time affects things, but it sure does get confusing when the US and other countries have different dates for when they go on/off DST. My broker's MT4 maintains the same offset compared to my local (US) time year-round, regardless of when DST changes, but I have no idea if all brokers do the same thing or not. Probably most are similar to my broker.

Certainly the primary usefulness of Plot_News is being made aware of future news events (as a visual alarm clock, so to speak). Obviously, it would be great if during the DST changes that I don't have to worry about adjusting Plot_News/FFcal.exe at all... and apparently for my MT4 broker, it all seems to work fine. But clearly another usefulness of Plot_News is to be able to go back in time and review the impact of past events. This is only possible if the arrows still line up. For my MT4 broker, apparently they do. In other words, I don't have to change any FFcal.exe settings at all, even when DST changes. Is this true for every MT4 platform??

It seems to me that the SOURCE of the news is the FF calendar site, and they have the onerous task of lining up all the world news events to be relative to NY US Eastern time, regardless of when the US or any other country changes DST. If that is true, and if MT4 brokers stay in sync with that time, then I think FFcal.exe should use this time as it's primary reference time.

e. I couldn't get my head around the FFcal time entries. I struggled, and put in some numbers in the FFcal form, ran it and plotted the arrows and kept adjusting until I got it right. When I was finished, here's what the answers were:


(I'm in US Mountain, so local time is NY-2 year round. Local time is GMT -6 or-7 depending on DST. As lastly, my local time is my MT4 time-9, year round.)

No. of hours your MT4 is ahead of FF calendar: 7
No. of hours your local time is ahead of your MT4 time: -9

Geez, these numbers were really confusing because MT4 swaps position in the two relative questions, and also because my "FF calendar" time actually displays the same time as my MT4 time (because I told it to). The answer would be "0" instead of "7" but that of course won't work.


I'd like to suggest a change to the time questions. See which one appeals to you:


Option1:
Current "New York" time plus ____ hours equals my MT4 time.

Option2:
Current "New York" time is ____ hours earlier than my MT4 time.

Option3:
When it is 08:00 "New York" time, my MT4 time is __:00

Option4:
When it is _____ "New York" time (e.g. "08:00"), my MT4 time is ______
( Current time available at http://www.worldtimezone.net/index24.php )

Depending on whether all MT4 brokers maintain the same relative offset to "New York" standard or daylight time, you might need to ask some additional questions, but that is going to be very complicated. It seems to me you would have to ask them some dates their broker changes from standard to daylight time, but what a huge bother, because those dates change every year. That would be too much to ask of you, David, the programmer, to keep track of such things. There might be windows of time (this year in March and later in October/November) where you'd have to know the dates that the US changes time, and also the dates the user's MT4 changes time. Yuck. Probably not worth the effort...

The user may just have to adjust the offset during the few weeks that there is a difference due to DST on/off differences.


3. I wish the FFcal.exe would remember my last entry to the question "Number of weeks' worth of data load". I'm always recalculating it in my head, and I guess that after the old data (with actual reported numbers) has been retrieved, there's really not much point in re-retrieving those same data points over and over. As I think about it now, I'm wishing that the "starting from what date" and the "Number of weeks" would auto-adjust their values somewhat to help me keep a couple of weeks of future news events, plus to retrieve the past weeks of data but only once. No need to overload the FF server with redundant data downloads. The program knows when it was last run, and if the starting week is completely in the past, then have FFcal do the download(s) as instructed from that week, but next time... seed the form with no more than 1 week back from the time the program was last run. If you were to adjust the start date automatically, then you can leave the "Number of weeks" setting the same as what the user enters (typically
"1" or "2" would be a useful default).


4. I have been using one installation of my MT4 for a long time, but the other day, I installed additional MT4's. When I copied over Plot_News.mq4 to the 2nd MT4, it failed to work. The error message in the Terminal->Experts section is:

Plot_News GBPJPY, M1: initialzed
Plot_News: invalid handle -1 in FileClose
Plot_News: invalid handle -1 in FileIsEnding

It occurs to me that both MT4 sessions ought to be able to read the same news.csv file, as long as the time-offsets are identical (they are). However, it's not working to display the news-arrows. Any ideas? Do I need to uninstall and reinstall something? Can I get both to work on the same computer simultaneously?


Whew... this was way longer than I intended. Thanks again for a great tool.

Pips4life

Hi Pips4life,

Thanks for your post!

First some general comment, as a reminder to everybody:

Plot_News/FFcal.EXE was originally created for my own use, and being a programmer, it is arguably not very user-friendly. The absolute bottom line is that since it’s offered to the FF community free of charge (despite my having put dozens of hours work into it to make it useable by others), it’s also offered on a "take it as is, or leave it" basis. (If people find it useful, then that’s great. If they find it unsuitable, cumbersome, intimidating or otherwise inadequate, then there’s no hard feelings on my part, I’ll just go on using it myself ).

Having said all that, I’m happy to consider requests for modification, as evidenced throughout this thread, although I try to implement those that I estimate would likely be helpful to the greatest number of users, especially given that I want to maintain only one version of the software. To accommodate everybody’s wish list into the same version, means that the number of parameters will necessarily increase, and hence it is going to become more complex to use. I’m afraid that’s unavoidable.

I’m currently working a full-time (programming) job, so pretty much the last thing I want to see when I arrive home from work in the evening is a computer!

Anyway, assuming I understand everything correctly, here are my responses to your 4 points:


1. Replotting the symbols. Must admit that I never anticipated that Plot_News would be used on a M1 chart. I expected that most traders would re-calc/re-plot the news symbols once per week, or maybe a couple of times a day, just in case news events have been added to (or modified on) the FF calendar.

However, I will look into this for you, when I have some spare time. I’m not sure what performance overhead would be involved in having the indicator re-plot itself every 1 minute (i.e. a new bar being formed).

Currently the simplest way (that I know of) to have the indicator re-plot itself is to edit the indicator (shortcut keys: Ctrl-I, P, Alt-E, Enter, Enter). (You may have to press the ‘P’ key multiple times, until Plot_News is selected, if you have more than one indicator name starting with ‘P’). That will at least save you the bother of recompiling using MetaEditor.

Plot_News has no control over how far future bars would potentially be plotted beyond the right hand edge of the screen. The time-scale along the horizontal axis is determined by MT4. All Plot_News does is plot the symbols, both past and future, at a given MT4-based time. There's a little upside-down arrow ("chart shift") symbol at the top of the chart, above where the current bar is being plotted. You can drag this symobol to the left, to give yourself more whitespace at the right of the screen, if you wish. Or switch temporarily to a longer time frame.


2. The timezone calculations. I will create another XLS spreadsheet to make this process as simple as possible, and post it here, when I have some time. There’s no way to automate the process completely, because FFcal.EXE can’t possibly get ‘inside’ MT4 to see what the broker’s timezone is.

Thankfully, these numbers only have to be set-up once, and then altered by 1 hour as/when daylight saving necessitates it.


3. The ‘Number of weeks’ parameter was added in v 1.06 (see post #102 in this thread) to remove the need for running the process multiple times, to (for example) build up a history of several weeks worth of data when first installing.

Apart from that, I didn’t foresee why anybody would ever want to load more than one week’s worth of data at a time. I would have thought that simply advancing the date forward by one week, every weekend, to retrieve the upcoming week’s news events from FF calendar, would have sufficed.

The ‘Number of weeks’ parameter returns to its default value of 1 each time for the very reason that you gave, to avoid unnecessary repetitive downloading from the FF servers.

I assume that you’re aware that FFcal.EXE keeps its own history (press F9 to view it) of all news events previously downloaded from the FF calendar? Hence there is no need to repetitively download historical data, unless you believe that the content of a previous week’s FF calendar might have been changed in the interim.

I could have the (default) date advance automatically by one week every Sunday, but then if anybody wanted to re-load the most recent week’s data (e.g. to make sure up-to-date ‘actual’ values have been collected), they would need to change it back again. IMHO it’s simple enough to use the pop-up calendar to advance the date whenever one needs to. After that, the date remains ‘sticky’ until it gets changed once again.


4. One news.csv file per MT4 version. I don’t know how to address this. Each version of MT4 can only ever look for files in its own folder hierarchy, i.e.
c:\program files\<MT4 brokername>\experts\files\...
You would need to ask the MT4 developers to change this.

The best already-available solution (that I can think of) is to maintain a separate settings ‘profile’ for each version of MT4 that you’re running. You can save and load (recall) any batch of settings that you wish. Copied from post #113 in this thread:

b) Settings Load/Save/Delete facility. You can now save any particular settings to a file, and then reload them quickly at any future point. You can have as many different settings files as you wish. This is especially handy if you’re running multiple versions of MT4, as it saves you the nuisance of having to retype the path\name each time you wish to update the News.CSV file for different versions. You can also create different settings profiles for special filters, e.g. CPI, non-farm payroll.

1. To save your current settings in a file, type the name of the file (6 characters max) in the window at the bottom of the screen, and click the Save button.
2. To reload any previously saved settings, either type the filename, or select it from the dropdown, and click the Load button.
3. To delete a settings file, either type the filename, or select it from the dropdown, and click the Delete button.
4. To make changes to an existing settings file, load it, make the changes, and then save it, either using its current name, or make a new file by typing another filename before clicking the Save button (leaving the original file unchanged).

David

Sorry, I missed answering this point in my previous post.

The error suggests that Plot_News was unable to open the news.csv file.

I suspect that it's most likely caused by Plot_News being unable to find the file. It must be named news.csv and exist in the folder
c:\program files\<mt4 broker folder name>\experts\files

Goes without saying that Windows is very finicky about spelling: puctuation, spaces, etc must be 100%.

Is it possible that you copied the news.csv file to the wrong folder?

Alternatively, the file might be empty (size = 0 bytes, when viewed in Windows Explorer).

I suggest you might consider maintaining different settings profiles in the way that I described in point 4 in my previous post.

David