I just got in my inbox today a nice article about charting the equivolumes, that was published by MQ in their MT4 site. Please click on it. This article is prefacing somehow my next topic, that I wanted to discuss long time ago, about trading the time, part 3. I had no time to finish my posting, so I will post a "part 3" now, just to mention it, and in the future I hope I will find enough free time to post a next episode about charting techniques. That would be renamed to "part 4" or else

The article above is discussing a technique to chart volumes of ticks together with the price movement. You can spend some time to read it and understand it, as that could be quite useful in forming you as a good trader. However, the solution proposed by the author is not the most elegant one. I will not go bitchy to criticize his methods, this is not the goal of this post. The article is very interesting, and is a must to read. I only want to say that pointing the charts according with a fixed number of ticks per bar was discussed long time ago in IBFX and codebase forums, and I also posted some of my indicators there. They were posted on vamist.com forum too, at that time (few months ago), and also in some different places. Using such indicators makes our life easier, when it come to the point of getting such fix-tick-amount charts in real time.

The goal of this blog entry is to post the indicator again, and I will refer to it in the future. You can set the tick count parameter to a value N, and one new candle will be drawn in separate window every time after N ticks arrived. You can use this indicator to estimate the "speed" of the market, by opening 2 or 3 different windows with different N (somebody on InterbankFX MT4 forum, where a preliminary version of the indicator was posted, suggested that time that the "periods" can be in a Fibo sequence, as 21, 34, 55 ticks, or 34, 55, 89, but I like to use smaller numbers as 13, 21, 34, for example, the difference in speed could be seen much easier. That was a long discussion there, but unfortunately I can't give you the link, as IBFX dismounted their forums ...).

I have to post it again, because most probably it suffered some changes since that time. I don't have time to check which versions I posted, and where. Most probable the posted versions have no moving average for the tick-chart, as this feature was added much later. I will come back to this point soon. Till then, here is the toy:

Tick_Tick_Tick.mq4

and here is a sketch with his abilities (3 indicators on chart, with 3 different N):

Be reminded that the candles are NOT corespondent, i.e. the candles on the chart and the candles on the indicators have different open time, even if they have the same shift left. If the parameter N (period) is smaller, then the chart is running faster, that is why you can see on the indicator's charts, in fact, only the last drop of the price. This indicator will "expand" the price action when the market is getting crazy, i.e. it will go into the details of the movements. I have marked with ellipses of 2 different colors the corespondent area in all 4 graphs, so you can see how the "expanding" works. By measuring the difference between the 3 windows below the chart, one can have an idea if the trend is getting steams or is getting sleeping pills... You can see how the "confusion" of the two moving averages (especially in the mid window) is somehow predicting the "boring" day (and lazy market) that was today. I am still using this toy sometime, together with PF, and I will explain later how. There is something related to moving averages, crosses, differences in speed. Just now, I only used the opportunity offered by publishing of the mentioned article in MT4 forum today, to bring into the discussion such tool, because is connected to our subject about trading the time.

More to come.

Happy pipping!

.t.