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By the way, happy pillaging for 2008!
Well, when talking about the time, there are mainly three schools. Some traders would say that the time is very important. They use candlesticks or bars charts, volumes, money flow index and other tools like that. This category of traders is the largest, and they use manly the price action on their trades, but they consider the time into the equation too. In fact, they use the time "partially". All these methods of charting that I enumerated above are in fact "time dependent" charting. You plot on the chart the price action, in time. That is, on X axis is the time, and on Y axis is the price. But here, time's contribution ends. For every candle, you know the opening and closing time, but that's all. By changing the time frame to a more granulated one, as from daily to hourly, you can have an idea about how the price developed inside of one candle. Eventually, you can get some information about the time when highest price and lowest price were reached, information that is not stored in the daily chart. But you still won't get any clue about the real movement of the price in time, about the "speed" of the price (speed is the time differential), or about the "acceleration" of the price. Indicators as momentum, or ROC, or other, are trying to give you a coarse view of these "time-actions" of the price, but they are also stored "bar by bar" and they are not of much help.
There is a second school (category) of traders that put the time in the first place. They don't use fixed hours, like opening and closing of sessions, or important moments during the week or the month, but a continuous "movement" of the price, and they use different type of charts that show the time-action of the price in the first place. This method use the time in the first place, and then the price. They plot on their charts information as "speed of the price" and "acceleration of the price" and few of them include also weekends into the hotpot. Together with second level quotations, this is a very strong instrument for a momentum ECN trader, but as such brokers require a big amount of money to play with, very few is known about this strategies, and they are not really useful for small traders like us, thus such charting methods are not so common. Maybe I would post in the future some technicals about "total time" trading, like polygraphs and multi-tick charts, but that is not the subject of the current entry.
What I would like to talk about now, is the third class of traders: that traders are not using the time at all. Yes, there is a big lot of traders that trade only the price. Most of them are big fish and they won't talk about their methods. They will keep intoxicating you with bars and candlesticks, as their goal is to gain the money that you are going to lose. They are mainly fundamental traders, that look to the economical data and plot their charts not as bars or candles, but totally time-independent. These traders are not interested in the TIME when a movement of the price took place, but only in the MOVEMENT itself. You can look on investopedia for Renko charts, or Kagi charts, to have an image about how these charts works. But incontestable, the king of "timeless" charting is Point And Figure (called below PF). Kagi charting is a very good tool to show the differences between supply and demand, and can be used by itself in trading long-term-trending markets, with quite a good risk/reward ratio. Kagi works like a Stop And Reverse technique and can give nice profits if traded with a StopLoss on classical SAR indicator curve. Renko charts represent just a pale time-spreading of point & figure charts, and they had some appeal to the people because most of the small traders have their mind "deformed" by candlesticks and bars. They like to see the "time-spreading" of the price in front of their eyes, and they don't feel comfy seeing only the columns of PF. That is where Renko charts come in. The disadvantage of PF is that you can't see the time at all. There is no NortEast/SouthEast movement, but only North/South columns. But this come with an advantage too: trading PF you will improve your discipline. Because you are not anymore interested of price action inside of any square. You just place your trades when the squares change according with your strategy entry, and close them when the squares change according with your strategy exit. If you don't know what I am talking about, you can find and read some materials on web, about PF trading strategies. There is plenty of good (and not so good) books about.
But the big advantage of PF is the time frame that you can see in front of your eyes. What? Didn't I just said that PF is not using the time? Well, it is not. But PF is a "highly condensed" form of the price action. For a normal H1 chart you can see in front of your eyes, depending on your screen resolution, about half a year of price action, even if you go to the lowest magnification factor. If your pair is moving in average 30 pips per hour (common value for some pairs) then your PF chart with a box size of 30 will show you on the screen the price action for the last few years! The resistances and supports are also more reliable, as they are not dependent of broker's behavior (as for example few brokers, like IBFX will show a Sunday candle, other not, this is "pushing" you trendlines on a normal candlestick chart to a different angles). Moreover, the "quiet" periods of the market are compressed in few squares, but the "agitated" periods (that with more opportunities to make money, or... lose money) are expanded. You also can select which box size you like, so it can "fit" you even if you are a long term investor or an intraday scalper. Changing the "time frame" of you candles won't change the "looking" of a PF chart, as they are not time-dependent.
So, the big advantage of PF charting is the fact that PF charting is not time-dependent, and it concentrates only on the price action.
Well, then what is its big disadvantage? Arrr... well... his big disadvantage is the fact that PF charting is not time-dependent... Don't smile! I know Asimov said it before me (see the end of his novel "The Naked Sun"). You can not see the opening and closing time of sessions, you can not see the weekends, you can not trade the "momentum", and YES, you CAN NOT see anything inside of the squares. Each square is a black box for you, even if it is an X, an O, a green rectangle or a red one, for you all are black boxes. You must wait for the price to jump outside of the box to be able to take any decisions.
So, my problem long time ago was how to improve the utility of the PF charts. Like for example to add to each box some useful info about how the price action inside of the box was. Was it choppy? Was it smooth? How may times the price tried to go out of the box? How long time the price stayed inside of the box? Couldn't be nicer if you were able to see the "fighting"... inside the boxes? Can a box in the middle of a column work as resistance or support level? Can it?
Exactly! I tried to add some time-information to the PF charting. There is not a big deal to do so. It is also quite easy to program it. The big deal is how to represent everything in graphical form to be easy to read, and nice-looking. The idea came somewhere in the mid of the last year, when I got from vamist some PF-charting indicator made by a Russian guy. The indicator itself was not a big deal, it does not consider at all the reversal amount , and it has a lot of bugs. But it gave me the graphical idea. That time we had long discussions on the forum and I tried to put all together and make a nice PF charting tool. I posted some graphics together with their comments and I distributed the tool to some Romanian friends. Few bugs popped up and I had to rewrite a part of it, and later on I added also the history stuff, together with a new version number. There are plenty of comments inside of the source code, so you better read them all before using the toy. Everything is provided "as is" and I won't take any responsibility for your loses, and also I won't claim any of your money in case you make any profit 
.
Here is the toy, and I am quite sure many of you are expecting it. It just took me some time to make some pictures and put everything in a zip. But now, as you got the indicators, be careful, having this files won't make you PF-Master overnight. If you never traded PF charts, better look for a book first, make few strategies, and try to trade them (test them) by your own and with demo money for a while.
Open to any question and suggestion.
.t.
P.S. By the way, does anyone have a good and freeware Gif Animator?? One who won't make a 5MB file from just few slides.... I tried to attach a small animation with B-Rays and B-Flags, but the file seems to be too big to be accepted by the blog (it says "unlimited space" but....)
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