I have problem with IB moving averaging. the problem is IB used former day'closing to caculate my moving averaging, so in the opening, if a gap up, the moving averaging is way down, or if gap down, the moving averaging is way up in the sky. or simply, if I use 30minutes to caculate my moving averaging, the opening 30minutes MA is wrong. anyone complain to IB or know we can configure chart settings to the current session's opening price ? when I look at yahoo chart, yahoo has right MA line
here is what I am talking about. USO EMA from Yahoo and from IB. did you notice almost half hr to one hour EMA in IB from the opening is totally distorted, you can not use it for trading?
Here is the same USO chart from Bigcharts, a fairly reliable source IMHO. Obviously they and IB include the last "x" number of bars from the previous day in their "x"-bar EMA at today's open. I don't know how Yahoo smooths for the gap down ... seems like they automatically convert it to a 1-bar EMA at the open, then 2-bar, 3-bar, .... until 39 bars (for your 39-EMA).
obviously no one cares last sessions' closing & x number bar backwards, we traders care more about forward minutes. actually it can be easily fixed. applies the opening price to last session's closing & x number bar backwards (all the same price, put last sessions' price with zero weight), from the opening, new data is keeping flushing in, so the EMA will change slightly after every tick.
Why would you not care about yesterday's closing price? ... or the prices in pre-market, for that matter? I'll use ema's on ES and YM in pre-market and after hours, and never would I want them distorted by negating the previous session's bars. Just curious about your need to have the ema start out flat at 9:30 est.
first I am a day trader. even half hour ago data to me is non-sense. I do not want the data in my EMA from previous day ( it is a session away's data, meaningless or useless at ll). I do not trade USO, I just trade crude/ES/NQ/NG most time. because of this problem, I need click pre-market in chart setting to start trading in the opening, the chart looks odd and not real, those data pops into mind and makes me feel they are important. I now switch to 1hour 1minutes chart bar to do trading, just try to get rid of those past data as soon as possible. so the chart should put most recent data in the obvious and the most important place.
That's fine, to each his own. I trade mostly the indexes, so your approach may be totally different than mine. I just wanted to share with you my observation that more often than not the significant pivots/reversals that appear on an intraday chart occur at S/R points or TL's left behind from prior sessions (1 or more days ago). I'm talking about the SIGNIFICANT intraday turns, and they usually or at least often are derived from highs, lows, closes and TL's from typically the last 1-5 days. The ema thing, that's more of an issue with whether you place any importance on pre-market activity. Personally I feel that all the data matters, especially with futures. In my experience the 24-hr emas can be a helpful gauge of the market's behavior at the gap open.