Plot News indicator (version 3.0)

Will never forget what a boost to my ego it was to sit in Kinko's (place in New York where you used to be able get online for free) Monday morning, and have people see me entering some esoteric code in FF_cal, then pressing enter on my netbook and watching the tech-y looking inverted-color windows flashing all those figures. I'm sure some thought: well maybe this bum is really quantitative. (Kinko's has now eliminated free internet, probably with the aim of marginalizing T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom) their former WiFi provider, and eliminating certain elements... riff-raff? - not I - who tended to fall asleep with their heads on their computer keyboards.)

Have not tried v.3 yet, but see from posts it is likely to have the inverted-color windows flashing again, so Hooray for Version 3.0... and (this intended for humor only) Have you considered hiring someone to teach people how to use it?

Glad it's only humor. It would make no sense for me to hire people when I make no income from the product myself.

There should be enough info in the 'Operating instructions' document to cover almost all requirements, beyond which there's no harm in experimenting. It's hard to 'break' the product when one can always start from scratch, and re-download all of the news events from FF, as a last resort.

If I ever get around to buying Camtasia Studio, I'll create and upload some instructional videos.

you don't need to buy camtasia. just go to here or here.
First link is a powerful and FREE video converter with camstudio built in, the second one is the original website for camstudio only application: FREE and OPENSOURCE.
I use both those software and I am very satisfied.
Give them a try.
regards

Awesome!
Many thanks for the info.

Sorry for the lame question, but are there instructions somewhere on how to update an EA that uses FFCal.ex4 to use this new version?

Peace.

There is no FFcal.EX4 here, only FFcal.EXE

If you're referring to Derk Weheler's FFcal.EX4, then here his Derk's thread. Alas, Derk and I unwittingly chose similar names for completely unrelated products, causing possible confusion.

If it's simply a typo, and you meant FFcal.EXE.......... I never intended FFcal.EXE to be called from within an EA. It's actually possible to do this, if you pass it the correct parameters. But I'm unwilling to disclose how, because it could result in EAs being written that call it on every new tick, thereby downloading the FF calendar continuously and possibly overloading the FF servers.

Instead, it's possible to manually run the Download News script once per week (or whenever you choose), and then have the Recent News indy output a file of news events, by setting the OutputFile parameter to a non-blank file name. This is explained more fully in the instructions doc in the ZIP file attached to post #1. An EA could then read the news events in this output file, and adjust its trading strategy accordingly.

Hi Hanover,
Great work on the Effects Analysis feature! Pls correct me if I missed something. I noticed that the news release time was base on FF time but the data was not based on the corresponding time of my broker.

eg. 6 Aug 2010 CAD Employment Change in @[email protected] and Recent News.csv shows 7am (FF time) and 2pm (my broker's) respectively. Pls see attached.

The time and Open in @EffDetl shows 7am and my historical open price at 7am respectively. Should the Open take the 2pm price instead? Otherwise subsequent calculation would be based on wrong data, ie 7am prices.

Do enlighten me if I mis-configured something. Btw I'm on v3.03 and the indicator is displaying the news correctly on my MT4 chart.

Thanks in advance
NewsGuy

The Effect Analysis reporting was added to the original Plot News back in v 1.27 more than 2 years ago. Yours is the first question that's ever been asked, hence I suspect that nobody else has ever attempted to use it. I haven't used it myself for a very long time, LOL. Anyway, here's a link to the instructions that were posted back in May 2008, just in case there's material there that might help you.

I received lots of complaints that the FFcal.EXE part of the application was too difficult to understand or use, hence I made it an auto-use feature, merely to gather the news from the FF calendar. (I resurrected FFcal.EXE for version 3 only because parsing the HTML using MQL4 was way too slow - taking up to 10 minutes to parse a week's worth of news).

Anyway, on to your question about the time shifts. In the original Plot News, the shift from FF time to MT4 br0ker time was performed by FFcal.EXE, at the time it downloaded the data. The shift is achieved by typing the number of hours into the field shown in the red box in the attached screenshot. (A positive value shifts forward in time, a negative value backward).

If you press Esc from this screen, and then F9, you should be able to see the effect of the shift. For example, if you first re-download the relevant week's data with 7 into this field, your example news event should be timestamped 1400 hours instead of 0700. In other words, the times stamped in FFcal.EXE's database should now reflect MT4 time, and the Effect Analysis will use these times for its reporting. Hence this should fix the problem you've described in your post.

However, given that all of the MT4 times have now been shifted forward by FFcal.EXE, and it's the shifted data that's forwarded to Recent News for plotting on your MT4 charts, you'll also need to change the SourceTimeIsGMTplus parameter in the Recent News indy. This is because the source is effectively no longer FF calendar, but FFcal.EXE. If you've shifted everything forward 7 hours in FFcal.EXE, then you'll likely need to add 7 to this parameter's current value, to 're-synch' everything. Hope that this makes sense.

Please post again if this doesn't fix the problem, and I'll troubleshoot further by running the Effect Analysis again myself.

Good luck,
David

I've run Effect Analysis reports and fixed a couple of bugs.

The @EffDetl report now works correctly for 5/3 digit br0ker quotes. When the app was originally written, virtually all br0kers used 4/2 digits. As a result of the fix, 5/3 digits are now shown in the Open prices output by the report. However, the Change columns continue to reflect the number of points (as opposed to pips) change, e.g. for a 5 digit EU quote, -65 would mean a fall of 6.5 pips. You can of course divide all relevant columns by 10, if you wish, when you reformat the result in MS Excel.

Another bug fixed is that the report was previously outputting commas to separate thousands, millions, etc which was confusing Excel, given that the field separators were commas also. After the fix, only the only commas that will be output are the field separators. Hence all columns should now align correctly when the data is imported into Excel.

I can now also confirm that the time being stamped on the output records is the same as that shown when the PREVIEW button is pressed in FFcal.EXE (see the instructions in the link in my previous post for more info). Hence the fix described in my previous post should solve your problem.

You can download the bug fix from post #1. Simply extract FFcal.EXE from the News v303.ZIP file, overwriting the previous version.

Hi Hanover,
Thanks for the swift fix. Used latest version and point to 5digit demo account. The numbers at @EffDetl is correct. However it's still strange at my 4digit LIVE account. However it's OK since I need it for analysis only.

Actually I already set the timing to 7 at the 'No of hours MT4 is ahead of FF' field to sync. However the review (f9) shows 7am instead of 2pm (see attached). Hence it's still pulling the data base on 7am. Can't figure out why. Pls help


NewsGuy

Not sure what you mean. If it's that the columns are still out of alignment, then (if you're running two versions of MT4) it's possibly because you need to install FFcal.EXE in both of the relevant folders. Or it could be that there's a problem with 4 digits; I can't troubleshoot as I don't have a 4 digit br0ker.

Only two things that I can think of:

1. Make sure that you're downloading data from the correct Sunday (field in red area in screenshot). i.e. to get news for Fri 6th Aug you need to download the week starting Sun 1st Aug.

2. Make sure that you haven't meanwhile run the Download News script with AutoplayMode = TRUE, as this will automatically change the settings in FFcal.EXE

Great Indicator.

Thanks Hanover.

News + Spectral Analysis = Good System

[quote=hanover;4032517]Not sure what you mean.

Hi Hanover
I was formerly on FXDD using its 4 and 5 digit acct. To experiment I tried another broker, IBFX, with different setting. In this case the no. of hours ahead of calender is 4 instead of 5.

However the @effdet is still capturing the FF time of 7am. Seems like it's independent of whatever value I enter.

Sorry I can't attach doc as Junior Member exceeded quota. Pls help.

I'm also looking for a MT4 broker with eastern time to use your ffcal.exe but can't find any yet.

Yes, you're right, there is a problem. I have managed to reproduce it here. The CAD employment data on Aug 6 is definitely coming across at 14:00 when the shift = +7, I don't understand why it's showing as 7:00 on @EffDEtl and @Effsumm.

The code is very complex, and I'm up to my neck fixing other bugs at the moment. I'll try to find some time to look at this, maybe this coming weekend.

Hi,

Does any one know of any version of this indicator that turns on and of the expert advisors in the MT4 regarding the existance of red and orange news?

Thanks in advance

There's no version of this particular indicator that can be possibly be directly linked to an EA. I can say that with a fair degree of certainty because the source code (.MQ4 file) has never been posted. However, there are CSV files of news events produced, that an EA could read --- for more info, see post #20.

The only other news indy that I'm aware of can be found here. I'm not exactly sure what's possible with that one, but you might like to take a look.

Well, although it may be some use to have FF_cal emerge right from the trading platform (so people in public places know you're doing something that has to do with trading) it doesn't seem to stay on the screen quite so long, and this may minimize the "affect" of being a really know-what-you're-doing Quantitative type. I still rather like the idea of being able to peruse my esoteric software and then manually enter the esoteric increments.

Had second scrape with the Plot_News Never Mind last nite. Thought lost forever. Suddenly Tuesday, when I didn't even look at a chart, had no news events. Tried to open Plot_News through the chart menu>incdicator list, but now on all my platforms it's suddenly impossible to open the dialogue by clicking on the indicator in the list. It seems to me. But Plot_News you can't open by hovering over it on the chart either, so panic-ed.

Then started downloading files and the instructions would turn up under "Indicators". Had to delete everything and start over. Thought about running a virus scan.

So, anyway, congrats on version 3.0. Glad I finally got to try it!

Hi Hanover,

I have been using your excellent indicator for 2 months now but today its all gone pear shaped. For some reason I cannot get any symbols on the chart older than this week. Looking at @[email protected] there is data missing between 20 Aug 2010 and 17 Oct 2010. I cannot see any symbols before 20 Aug 2010 on the charts either.

Screenshot attatched.

I tried a fresh install into a another MT4 installation with the same result.

How should I use FFcal.EXE to update the Clarion database with the data from 21 Aug 2010 to the present?

I have tried running Download News script in AutoPlay Mode and also by changing the FF calendar starting date via the pop-up calendar but I cannot seem to fill the missing data from 21 August.

Can you tell me where I am going wrong?

Regards,

hippyjohn.

HJ,

First, thanks for the detailed explanation and screenshot. If everybody made the effort to do this, it would make troubleshooting so much easier.

I don't know what's gone wrong, but if you take the following steps it should hopefully remedy the situation:

Go to Windows File Manager and find folder ...../indicators/files, then run FFcal.EXE (see first screenshot).

Ensure that it is showing version 3.03 in the window header, and that you have the red-arrowed field settings exactly the same as those shown in the second screenshot. Then click the Clear and Reset buttons shown, and finally the OK button.

This should download the 10 weeks' worth of data from Sunday Aug 15 thru Saturday Oct 23, one week at a time. Hence you will see the black screen with the white dots appear and disappear 10 times. Please DON'T attempt to interfere with this process while it's running.

When the job is complete, you should see a window like that shown in the third screenshot. (If not, then press Esc then F9 to load it). Page down repeatedly to ensure that all of the relevant days' news events have been loaded. As you can see, when I ran the process it downloaded the required events. Then exit this application by pressing Alt-F4.

Next, load the file news.csv (return to first screenshot) into Notepad++ or Excel, and check that the news events appear there also (see my final screenshot).

I can see from your screenshot that you're using Presets---Recent News.002 as your parameter file, and that the date range (From Date and Thru Date parameters) cover the required range, so that should not be the cause of your problem.

Finally, switch between timeframes on your MT4 chart, to refresh the indicator.

Does this work? If not, at what stage of the process did the news events not appear?

David

Not 100% sure what you're asking here, but is there a specific problem? If so, can you post an explanation and screenshot showing the point at which the process breaks down?

Thanks,
David