Useful shortcut in TS

I don’t know if you are like me but I like to mark my charts with trend lines, divergences, arrows, text, and all sorts of drawings are the market unfolds.  However I gew tired of having to click on the little toolbar icon for the drawing tool and then having to find the other little toolbar icon to switch back to the small pointer so that I could navigate my charts.  I found a solution in the form of a macro.  With macros you can assign a ‘hot key’ to a number of things including pointers.

In order to do this, click on the ‘View’ menu and then ‘Macros’, the screen below will appear.

You can then click on the ‘Toolbars’ button.  Once in toolbars, click on the ‘pointers’ choice in the left column, and then select the small pointer in the right column.  Once those selections are made click on the Hot Keys button in the bottom right corner of the dialog (see below).

While in the Hot Keys dialog, position your mouse pointer in the ‘Press new Hot Key’ and press the hot key of your choice for the small pointer.  In this example I have decided to assign the F12 keys for the small pointer.  This mean that if I am in drawing tools and I want to quickly switch back to my small pointer, I will just need to press F12 instead of having to find the toolbar icon.  For me pressing a key is a lot faster than moving my mouse around and clicking on a small icon among many.

Now obviously this is just one small example of the use of macros.  Macros are a powerful and convenient tool to expedite many of the cumbersome or repetitive tasks in Tradestation.  Enjoy the feature.

Squeeze Bars

Here is a spin of the good old Squeeze indicator (see earlier posts).  With this new paintbar indicator called ‘Squeeze Bars’ I have brought the signal of the Squeeze indicator to the price chart.  So there is no longer a need to consume your scarce screen real estate with another subgraph indicator.  The Squeeze bars will paint when the Squeeze condition is met, i.e. the Bollinger bands are ranging within the Keltner channels.  Once the Squeeze condition is over, a channel will plot.  The top line of this channel will be set at the highest high of the squeeze bars and the bottom line will be set at the lowest low of the squeeze bars.  The channel will be used as a breakout indicator.  For instance one could wait to get a close above or below this channel to enter a trade.  With the squeeze bars I abandoned the momentum component of the former squeeze indicator.  Instead I am using the squeeze bars in combination with the MACD BBs (see earlier posts) to determine the direction and success potential of the trade (success being a function of the strength and momentum of the MACDs).

The chart below illustrates the squeeze bars in combination with MACD BBs on a @ES 1024 tick chart.

The example shows two sets of squeeze bars developing on the 1024 tick chart.  Upon plotting its last squeeze bar, the first set plots a channel.  The trader can then use the information provided by the MACD BBs to determine the direction and success potential of the trade.  In this case we see that the MACD BBs are above the Zero Line (ZL) and show good strength (at upper Bollinger Band).  In this case the trader would obviously go long.  In the second set we see a bearish breakout with strong MACDs to the downside (outside Bollinger Bands) along with a breakout of the Zero Line.

Update

Wow, this update is way overdue.  A lot has happened since the last post.  We sold the house (which was a miracle given the real estate market), we moved South, we settled in a new house, the kids started school, my wife started a new career, and I did the unthinkable…I turned down a generous offer to dedicate myself full-time to trading.  This decision was huge for me, and a bit uncomfortable I have to confess.  I am basically a corporate guy, I do well in business, I do well in teams, I am good at what I do.  But the truth is that I am bored with what I do, I have done it for many years now and the prospect of going into another similar job, even though the money was good, just seemed so incredibly depressing.  So with my wife’s support and encouragement, I made the decision to turn down the offer and to spend my time honing my trading skills in the hope of becoming a successful and profitable trader.  So here I am, I burned the ships, there is no going back.