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Attachments: Improved multi-timeframe/offset/chart period converter, P4L PeriodCon.mq4
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Improved multi-timeframe/offset/chart period converter, P4L PeriodCon.mq4

  • #41
  • Jan 17, 2010 3:34pm Jan 17, 2010 3:34pm
Quoting fxpig
Hi Kent,

Thank you for posting your indicators. However will there be possible
for modifying P4L PeriodCon.mq4 to show 2048 candles after conversion?


fxpig
The offline chart generates as many candles as it can from your source chart. If you have an H1 chart with 13325 hourly candles, it will generate about 13325/24= 555 Daily bars.

If I understand correctly, you want the ability to limit the number of bars it generates? So, instead of 555 daily bars, you might only want 100 ?

I suppose it's possible to do but I've no idea what purpose this would serve. Would you care to elaborate?
  • #42
  • Jan 17, 2010 5:28pm Jan 17, 2010 5:28pm
Quoting pips4life
The offline chart generates as many candles as it can from your source chart. If you have an H1 chart with 13325 hourly candles, it will generate about 13325/24= 555 Daily bars.

If I understand correctly, you want the ability to limit the number of bars it generates? So, instead of 555 daily bars, you might only want 100 ?

I suppose it's possible to do but I've no idea what purpose this would serve. Would you care to elaborate?
Hey pips,
I think fxpig was meaning a minimum of 2048 daily candles.



If that is the case fxpig, you need 49152 (or more) 1 hour bars in your 1 hour history to generate your required daily bars.
That's a lot of history and may slow down your trading platform if doing it for multiple currencies.
  • #43
  • Jan 19, 2010 8:02pm Jan 19, 2010 8:02pm
Hey pips, amazing stuff.

Is this like to be able to generate constant range bar charts?
ie not unlike a renko in that they are formed by movement and not time, except instead of bricks you still have a candle with the usual O/H/L/C.
Good Trading
  • #44
  • Jan 21, 2010 3:35am Jan 21, 2010 3:35am
Quoting aud
Hey pips, amazing stuff.

Is this like to be able to generate constant range bar charts?
ie not unlike a renko in that they are formed by movement and not time, except instead of bricks you still have a candle with the usual O/H/L/C.
My "P4L PeriodCon.mq4" indicator is strictly for time-based charts. I have noticed there are some range bar and/or #tick bar indicators written for MT4 but I have no experience with any.

Try a search.
Here's something on tick bars (not range): http://articles.mql4.com/548
A google search for "range bars mq4" shows several possibilities. Obviously it would be best if the indicator saves (or imports) tick data so you don't lose everything when you shut down MT4 (or even just change timeframes).

Good luck.
  • #45
  • Feb 3, 2010 6:45am Feb 3, 2010 6:45am
Hi there pips!

You have done a good work improving such a useful tool, but IMHO I believe you are committing a logical mistake.

Your user defined section has too many parameters but does not accomplish much.

In my opinion the next version should have fewer but more efficient parameters.

For example: Right now if I input 13 bars with a -11 time sift it messes up the output completely.

If you make the user defined section based on "time only" it will accomplish much more than what you get now.

So if the user defines that he wants a bar starting at 2AM server time and closing 8PM server time, the program will output it in a synthetic bar ( from 2:00 till 8:59). Than the next "synthetic bar" all the remaining bars will be formed, until 1:59 server time, and the process will start again 2AM.

This kind of approach (time based only) would be easier to inexperienced traders and will allow almost complete freedom of choice.

Even more....if you add a second time input option, the freedom would be even greater because one could have multiple time frames (bars) in the same window if he chooses it.

For example:

I can input my first candle to be a 4 hour bar followed by a 60 min, than my next bar a 12 hour bar, the next a 6 hour, etc so "clusters" of time will be showed in the same environment, and all user defined.

Something like this is used on some institutions to "segregate" dead periods of the market and "high-lite" more active periods, but I never saw it on free chart packages as Metatrader.

Anyways keep on the good work
  • #46
  • Feb 3, 2010 12:06pm Feb 3, 2010 12:06pm
Quoting Platypus
Hi there pips!

You have done a good work improving such a useful tool, but IMHO I believe you are committing a logical mistake.

Your user defined section has too many parameters but does not accomplish much.

In my opinion the next version should have fewer but more efficient parameters.

For example: Right now if I input 13 bars with a -11 time sift it messes up the output completely.

If you make the user defined section based on "time only" it will accomplish much more than what you get now.

So if the user defines that he wants...

Hi Platypus,

Thanks for the feedback, although respectfully, for the changes you suggest, I'm not personally too interested in seeing such charts with irregular time-length bars. Maybe someone else would be interested to make the modifications, but IMO there are better options.

To isolate various sections of a daily chart, I would suggest using a "Sessions" indicator. (There are various versions out there). Typically, one can specify exact start/end times for the Asian,London, US sessions and see an overlay-rectangle highlight the various sessions. The sides of the rectangle are the times, and the top-bottom sides are the session price-range.

For the record, your choice of PeriodMultiplier=13 "works" but would never be a logical choice for this indicator (in it's present form). It is only designed to take the data from your source chart and multiply it by some number to create a chart with that many source-bars clustered together for form a new single bar (on a higher timeframe). There is no daily "break" time that would always start a new bar at a specific time. Perhaps you thought the TimeShift was for this purpose, but no it is not. It shifts the 1st bar start time. Had you chosen a PM value that evenly divided up a single day, then the charts would make a lot more sense. Given an H1-source chart, if you desire to see some number of bars evenly divide up a 24-hour day, then logical PM choices would be 2,3,4,6,8, and 12. Choice "13" is not there... it makes no sense for a regular bar-length.

Regarding your suggestion to convert the user-options to ONLY "time" based choices... would seem to me you missed a lot of the value of this indicator. The PM and timeshift options offer the flexibility to take any source chart and create any higher timeframe chart, with a timeshift if desired. MT4 doesn't offer several useful chart-periods, including M2, M3, M6, M10, M20, M45, M90, H2, H6, H8, H12, D2, ... etc. Furthermore, MT4 (nor MT5 ??) doesn't offer any capability to timeshift at all.

If ones' focus in only on splitting up a single day into 3-4 irregular time-length bars, then I can see how the time-based inputs might be useful, but as mentioned previously, I think sessions indicators are better suited for this purpose.

Good trades to you,
Kent
  • #47
  • Feb 3, 2010 1:20pm Feb 3, 2010 1:20pm
Quoting pips4life
Hi Platypus,

Thanks for the feedback, although respectfully, for the changes you suggest, I'm not personally too interested in seeing such charts with irregular time-length bars. Maybe someone else would be interested to make the modifications, but IMO there are better options....
Hi there Pips.

I'm not asking for something like that , since I already have a custom platform with this kind of things.

My point was that I saw this kind of things among professional trading institutions but never out there for free.

If I have some time I will code something myself and post here later.

Best regards.
  • #48
  • Apr 27, 2010 2:36am Apr 27, 2010 2:36am
Hey there Pips,

I had tried to play with the indicator and found it as a very strong tool, but i think I had found a little "bug" with it (or maybe i was missing something).

It seems that the indicator can't aggregate bars before the weekend and after the weekend, for example see the attached NZDUSD daily chart.

I had tried to aggregate 23.04.2010 and 26.04.2010 (both are marked with Black arrows), as i had said i had tried to aggregate it into 2D bar but with no luck. I did manage to do it by aggregate it to 4D bar (it seems that the indicator is counting the 2 days on the weekend where there is no trade).

the problem is more severe on the lower TF, let's say you want to aggregate bars on the 1H TF, if those bars are from before the weekend and after the weekend you will have to add ~48 bars and in that case it change the overall picture.

Do you know how to solve this problem or there is no problem and i had missed something?

thx,
Yaniv
Attached Image (click to enlarge)
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  • #49
  • Apr 27, 2010 10:51am Apr 27, 2010 10:51am
Quoting (Yaniv)
It seems that the indicator can't aggregate bars before the weekend and after the weekend, for example see the attached NZDUSD daily chart.

I had tried to aggregate 23.04.2010 and 26.04.2010 (both are marked with Black arrows), as i had said i had tried to aggregate it into 2D bar but with no luck. I did manage to do it by aggregate it to 4D bar (it seems that the indicator is counting the 2 days on the weekend where there is no trade).

Do you know how to solve this problem or there is no problem and i had missed something?
Hi Yaniv,

The way it's presently designed, this indicator does not aggregate candles across the weekend gap. I'm also of the mind that it would not be a good idea to do so either, since my opinion is that on occasion, big news occurs over the weekend and so to combine a Friday close candle with a Sunday/Monday open candle would give a misleading "feel" for such a bar. Perhaps it would be useful to do so -- I don't know -- but this indicator was not designed to do so.

You should think of the time as a full 24x7 week, split up into whatever timeframe you have chosen (i.e. "D2"). For most broker feeds, there will
be a 48 hour gap in the data (or sometimes 47 hours, or 49 hours, ...).
However it slices it up will determine what each bar contains.

A "D2" chart is a little bit strange because there are only 7 days/week, so the clustering of 2-days together actually is different every-other-week! The 2-week sequence of the starting time for each D2 bar would be: Mon/Wed/Fri/Sun/Tue/Thu/Sat and then repeat again with Mon/...
In such a sequence, the "Sat" bar most likely has no data so it wouldn't print. The "Fri" and "Sun" bars would each only have 1-day of actual trading data. As you have noted, there is no aggregating of data across the weekend gap.

Kent
  • #50
  • Apr 27, 2010 11:12am Apr 27, 2010 11:12am
Quoting pips4life
Hi Yaniv,

The way it's presently designed, this indicator does not aggregate candles across the weekend gap....
Hey Kent,

Thank you very much for your quick respond, i really appreciate it.

As for the indicator, your answer was what i was thinking.

Again, thank you for your kind help.

Yours,
Yaniv
  • #51
  • Apr 28, 2010 5:01am Apr 28, 2010 5:01am
I have tried P4L PeriodCon v1.8. I use ATC Brokers MT4 ECN demo.

I have created a daily chart with GMT time (EURUSD+4H,Daily). It works fine: at 0.00 GMT, a new bar is created and every new tick comes through.

My problem is: if I put my EA to the created chart, it does not work (no buy or sell orders). I do see the smiley, so the EA should work.

Anyone?
  • #52
  • Apr 28, 2010 9:49am Apr 28, 2010 9:49am
Quoting NederPip
I have tried P4L PeriodCon v1.8. I use ATC Brokers MT4 ECN demo.

I have created a daily chart with GMT time (EURUSD+4H,Daily). It works fine: at 0.00 GMT, a new bar is created and every new tick comes through.

My problem is: if I put my EA to the created chart, it does not work (no buy or sell orders). I do see the smiley, so the EA should work.

Anyone?
Most likely, your EA is programmed to take trades in whatever the chart symbol is, as reported by the function "Symbol()". Unfortunately, due to your use of a timeshift value, the "P4L PeriodCon" takes over the symbol name and renames it to append the chart timeshift.

Hence, the EA is probably telling MT4 to take a trade of "EURUSD+4H" rather than just "EURUSD". MT4 has no idea what "EURUSD+4H" is, so it's confused.

As was mentioned in post #1, some indicators/scripts/EA's may need to be modified to be compatible with the offline charts my indicator generates because of the way such charts may return non-standard values for either the "Symbol()" and/or "Period()" functions. Most likely your EA source code must be modified to strip off all characters of the symbol after a "+" or "-" sign (inclusive), then it will probably work.
  • #53
  • Apr 28, 2010 10:19am Apr 28, 2010 10:19am
Quoting pips4life
Most likely, your EA is programmed to take trades in whatever the chart symbol is, as reported by the function "Symbol()". Unfortunately, due to your use of a timeshift value, the "P4L PeriodCon" takes over the symbol name and renames it to append the chart timeshift.

Hence, the EA is probably telling MT4 to take a trade of "EURUSD+4H" rather than just "EURUSD". MT4 has no idea what "EURUSD+4H" is, so it's confused.

As was mentioned in post #1, some indicators/scripts/EA's may need to be modified to be compatible with the offline...
Thank you!

Then first I have to learn a bit about programming... I will take a look at it.

Regard to the following EA (Expert+10_eng):

http://codebase.mql4.com/6243

I want to forward test that EA in GMT time settings.
  • #54
  • Edited 1:06pm Apr 28, 2010 12:50pm | Edited 1:06pm
pips4life,

I think I understand what you mean, but I don't understand your last sentense quite well, what exactly to change.

I only want to use this EA to EURUSD. In MetaEditor, indeed I see "Symbol()" several times.

I might try to change every "Symbol()" into "EURUSD+4H". Or do I have to fill "EURUSD+4H" between the ()-signs?

You would think it works well then?
  • #55
  • Apr 28, 2010 6:27pm Apr 28, 2010 6:27pm
Quoting NederPip
Thank you!

Then first I have to learn a bit about programming... I will take a look at it.

Regard to the following EA (Expert+10_eng):

http://codebase.mql4.com/6243

I want to forward test that EA in GMT time settings.

Hi NederPip,

You might be surprised but I have done very little with EA's and the MT4 StrategyTester. When I played around with it a bit today, I saw that the form restricts what one can enter as the Symbol name. There is no way (that I know) to enter "EURUSD+4H" as the symbol to work with, and in some respects this makes sense because it uses the data from lower timeframes to build up higher ones. You can't just give it the Daily +4H data and expect it to have any clue about the M1 details that it uses for modelling.

That said, I don't see any way to use the MT4 StrategyTester to test timeshifted charts, nor non-standard Periods.

I suspect that one could successfully modify an EA so that it can trade LIVE (or demo) from a timeshifted and/or non-standard-period chart, but I haven't actually tried it.

For sure, if you want to use the StrategyTester to try out different timeshifts, then about your only option I can think of is to install MT4 from various brokers and find one that has the desired timeshift, and that has reasonable data quality, hopefully free of the BS games that some brokers play with their feeds to stop hunt, spike, etc.

After using the StrategyTester with different broker feeds, if you end up finding some offset that you really prefer, but your live account is on a different broker, that's when you might try a modified EA to work with an "offline" chart with your live broker that does the desired timeshift.


That is an interesting EA. It sure needs a trailing stop routine IMO. It turns out there is a v1.1 with some added features on the original Russian site. Thanks for bringing this to my attention... I'll check it out. (Got any more tips on decent EAs? Thx).
  • #56
  • Apr 29, 2010 8:17am Apr 29, 2010 8:17am
Hello pips4life,

It seems that I can't test the timeshifted data in the StrategyTester. That's a pity, but I want to use the EA on a demo account. Do you have any idea how to modify this EA so that it can trade on demo from a timeshifted chart?

Sure, it's an interesting EA. A trailing stop routine could be interesting too. I've downloaded the v1.1 version from the Russian site (thank you). I do see something with trailing stop when I look in MetaEditor, but I do not exactly know what extra features there are, do you?

For now, the most important thing for me to know, is how to get the EA('s) working on a timeshifted chart..

I've discovered the world of forex trading and EA's only a month ago. I did not even know such thing existed (automatic trading). So I still don't know much interesting EA's. Maybe this is something for you:

http://strategy4forex.com/category/s...forex-strategy

I hope you can help me a bit more.
  • #57
  • May 1, 2010 12:59pm May 1, 2010 12:59pm
Does anybody know where the "start date/time" is for MT4? That is to say, where time starts ticking. This doesnt matter at all for TF's like H1, where everythng is divided evenly every 24 hours. But if you open an H10 chart using H1 data, you will see the open price of the FIRST H10 bar in your history is the same as the open price of the first H1 bar in your history, which is to be expected, since you used H1 data in making the chart.

However the opening time is different, which is the same phenomena you see at the start of a new week with odd timeframes, with the first candle actually containing a smaller amount of time than it "should." I understand the weekend phenomena, but I don't understand where time is starting when it comes to the beginning of your history...just where is my H10 chart starting to "tick"? Is it the year 1900 at 00:00, like Microsoft Excel and some other programs? Why would it match the opening price of my first H1 candle, but not the time?

Racking my brain trying to figure this out, any help would be greatly appreciated.
  • #58
  • May 1, 2010 4:49pm May 1, 2010 4:49pm
Quoting 24HourTrader
Does anybody know where the "start date/time" is for MT4?...

Many programs use function "TimeCurrent()" to return the time in seconds. It's value of 0 is Jan 1, 1970, I think at 00:00. It would be that time on YOUR broker's clock time as compared to GMT.

The "P4L PeriodCon.mq4" code does not, however, use TimeCurrent. The starting time is the oldest bar in your source chart. If PeriodMultiplier=10, then the next bar will be 10 hours later, etc. Weekends are treated the same as any other day whether there is data or not (usually not). Since a full week as 168 hours (7*24), this is represented by 16 H10 bars plus a partial H10 bar of 8 hours. That should shift the time of the first Monday bar by 2hours each week. The pattern repeats every 5 weeks. Obviously since weekends typically have no data for ~48 hours, the gap would be 4 full bars (40 hours) then you would have 1-or-2 partial bars on either-or-both sides of the weekend.

One can choose any PeriodMultiplier value, but it seems to me that the most useful periods should be repetitive the same way every day or week. Therefore I would suggest to focus on periods which divide either a 24 hour day evenly, or a 7-day week evenly. "H10" does not qualify. Neither does "D2" as described in a previous post. But M10, M20, M45, H2, H3, H6, H8, H12... these are good repetitive choices. For a 168-hour week, note that 168 = 2*2*2*3*7. Pick any 2 or more of these factors to get a repetitive period (in hours).
  • #59
  • May 1, 2010 5:40pm May 1, 2010 5:40pm
Quoting pips4life

The starting time is the oldest bar in your source chart. If PeriodMultiplier=10, then the next bar will be 10 hours later, etc.
Thanks for your response. This is exactly why I'm confused, since the indi is not working as you described here.

I attached 2 pics...you can see the M1 chart, the source chart, has its first candle as 9:31....but if you look at the second chart, an M47 chart created from this data, the first candle is at 9:13, and the second candle at 10:00.. neither of these candles are 47 minutes after 9:31. It is like the data is starting somewhere further back in time. See what I mean?
  • #60
  • May 1, 2010 5:42pm May 1, 2010 5:42pm
Forgot the pics!
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