Timelines are indicators the draw lines across the bottom of a screen to give you a visual indication of the time during the trading day.

They can display many things, such as when different markets open and close or specific periods during the trading day.

DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS

Different traders use timelines for different reasons. Currency traders will want to know things such as the time of the European open or the asian close.

Index traders usually look for periods during the day such as the open, lunch, and pre-market.

At the end of the day, timelines help you trade better by knowing what time you are in in the trading day.

TIMELINE FOR THE ES

This is my version of a timeline for the ES. The only parameter is the time-zone. By default, it is set to CST ( Chicago time ) and has settings for PST and EST.

This indicator is a little different in that it gives you a 5 minute warning before a change. When I am watching a trade, I want to know BEFORE the change. It gives me more time to prepare to enter/exit a trade.

If you click on the graphic , you will see a light green bar before the open. That is a color change that appears 5 minutes before the color changes to red. That little bit of warning helps me, I hope it helps you too.

The 5 minute bars are different sizes because I am using tick charts and they can have a different number of bars in a 5 minute period.

TIME TABLE

TW Timelines only has two colors, Red and Green. The light Green and light Red mark the transition times between two time periods.

The times for the indicator to go red are:

Opening : 8:30 A.M. Central Time
Lunch Break : 11:00 A.M. Central
Bond Market Close : 2:00 P.M. Central

These times are my preferences. The Bond pit closes at 2:00 P.M. Chicago time, and that may influence the stock market. Some people pay attention to that, others do not. If you have any ideas for other timelines, drop me a line at blog @ traderwerks.com

DOWNLOAD TIMELINE INDICATOR

I have put a banner ad up on the site for you to download this indicator when you sign up for the mailing list. I do not send much on the mailing list, but I put any updates to my free indicators there so it is a good thing to be receiving when I update indicators.

If the offer has expired, is because the free download has been cancelled, changed, folded , spindled or mutilated ( Just kidding ) . I do rotate the free indicators, so if the offer is gone, AND you are on the mailing list, email me and I will see about getting you a copy.

When you convert an automated trading strategy from one system to another, there are a lot of things that will be  ’missing’. Such as a trading strategy from Tradestaion to NinjaTrader, you may not have some of the built in indicators that you had with the previous platform.

I have converted trading strategies from different platforms to NinjaTrader and ran into this problem. I ended  up creating NinjaTrader versions of a bunch of Tradestation indicators. Case in point,  this one is called Volatility in TradeStation.

Tradestation volatility is an indicator that measures the current volatility of the market. There are other measures of volatility , such as standard deviation.  It is different from things like standard deviation, in that it uses the high , low and close of a bar to calculate the volatility and not just the closing price like a standard deviation based indicator does.

You can click on the image to see a  huge image from Tradestation and compare it with the same indicator from the same timeframe on the image below.

TRADESTATION VOLATILITY INDICATOR FOR NINJATRADER

Note, that this is is a clone of the TradeStation indicator.  I got it as close as possible . This version of of the Volatility indicator matches the current TS version.

The original version in Tradestation, from the book ( See Reference Below ),  is now called VolatilityClassic. Like Coke Classic I guess.  I do think the current version is better than the original, in my humble opinion.

As you can see from the two images, they are very, very, similar.  No matter what you do, there will be small differences whenever you take an indicator from one platform to another. Such is life.

HOW TO USE THE INDICATOR

Volatility can be used in a couple of ways, the easiest would be the setting of stops. The more volatile the market, the further away you want your stops. Of course, this increases the risk. Another way is discretionary trading. Volatility sometimes reaches an extreme near the end of a move. A discretionary trader could use that to exit a trade.

DOWNLOAD NINJA TRADER VOLATILITY INDICATOR

I have put a banner ad up on the site for you to download this indicator when you sign up for the mailing list.  I do not send much on the mailing list, but I put any updates to my free indicators there so it is a good thing to be receiving when I update indicators.

If  the offer has expired, is because the free download has been cancelled, changed, folded , spindled or mutilated ( Just kidding ) .  I do rotate the free indicators, so if the offer is gone, AND you are on the mailing list, email me and I will see about getting you a copy.

Reference
Kaufman, P.J. The New Commodity Trading Systems and Methods.
John Wiley & Sons. New York 1980. Pages 99-101

FREE INDICATOR OF THE MONTH

I have decided to release some of the indicators for NinjaTrader I have written when translating Easy Language strategies to Ninja Trader. So I will post them for download for a month, or until I replace it with another indicator. So I guess technically , it should be “Free Indicator Of The Moderately Indeteminate Time Frame With A Median Time Of One Month”. While technically correct, that would be too long for the title of a post. As well as boring.

TRADESTATION

A lot of people are moving from TradeStation to NinjaTrader. There could be a lot of people moving the other way, but I would have no idea, since they would not be contacting me.

I try to avoid writing EL ( Easy language ) code anyway, I prefer C# to EL. That is just me, I know a lot of people who love TradeStation. Now if I could just get an application that was written in C++ on Linux…….

COMING UP

I am releasing the TS Volatility Indicator (a Tradestation indicator converter to NinjaTrader ) first. I will release the VolumeRatio ( also a Tradestation indicator converter to NinjaTrader ) and my Opening Range indicator in the next few weeks. So get on the list and get them mail to you when they are released.

Photo Courtesy kalandrakas