I had a question about tick bar charts with esignal. When you use time charts (ex 5 min) and gridlines, you get a dividing line at the beginning of the day that separates the previous day from the beginning of the new day. However with tick bar charts (ex 300 ticks per bar) I can't find a clean way to divide the previous day from the start of the new day. Esignal just blends all of the data together. Is there an option I can not find on there or is this a feature that needs to be added? It would seem to make sense that you want to start counting the beginning of the day and the beginning of your tick bars when the market opens or when ever else you want to specify the time for your day to start. Any suggestions out there from other tick bar chart users
Welcome to the fuzzy world of tick charts. First question you'll want to ask - "On my chart - when is the first tick for the first bar?" - because that will make a difference where and when bars later in the chart close.
Well looking at indexes I would want the first tick or the bar to start at the opening time of the market. That way if you wanted to line up the charts with someone else you could specify the same start and end times and have the same charts to compare notes with. Then maybe the last bar of the day would not have the full tick count when the market closed. Then the next day you start the count over again from one. What other issues have you come across dealing with tick bar charts?
And that is the problem. I presume you want your ES chart to begin its day the same as the floor session, 8:30 central. However in ES you are trading the GLOBEX session which actually began something like 3:30 central the previous day. Maybe Esignal could provide user defined vertical lines to divide the days. Other than that you just have to use the cursor window to figure out which bar starts the new day.
Well you can user define your trading times in most charting packages including Esignal. However it is not working with the tick charts to set a starting time line and an ending one. Like I said earlier it would seem easy to be able to set your use defined start and end time when ever you want and have the tick bars start counting from then. If the last bar of the day only has 240 out of 400 ticks then still end it at that time with the uncomplete bar. At least you could line up your charts with other traders so that you are all looking at the same thing. So I take it that esignal does not have this option then like it does with the min charts. The same problem can occur with min charts too depending on where your day starts and at what time you start your trading day so I don't know why it is any different with tick bar charts.
At this point, the feature of ending a tick bar with the close of the market, and effectively starting a new bar with the opening does not exist in eSignal. There is an EFS (eSignal Formula Script) that has been built to draw a vertical line at the open of the market. This EFS can be found at http://forum.esignalcentral.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1743
Was there difficulties in trying to do this when Esignal was developing the tick bar charts or is the process more difficult then I think it is. I have noticed the same thing on other software products too. There is no way to standardize the charts so everyone can be looking at the same chart formations
You can do what you're wanting to do with Ensign software with your existing esignal datafeed, but it'll cost an extra $40 a month, which is the monthly subscription cost for Ensign.
Ensign has its share of issues with tick charts too which I just found out about. They are working on them right now. I thought I would see if esignal had some solutions to the same problems. Anyway I will PM you about it.
I have passed this along to our Product Development Team for further consideration. I'm uncertain the reason this was not added, but I can certainly see the value it in.