How many decimal places in a futures symbol?

[perfectinglife]

Hi All,

I am sure there is an easy way to tell the number of decimal places that a symbol's price returns. (ie Russel is 1, ES is 2, 6E is 4), but I cant seem to find a simple solution.

Thanks for any help you can give.

Jerry

[DuaneG]

Hi Jerry,

Thanks for the post. I'm a little unsure of what you are searching for. Are you looking for an EFS that will return the amount of decimals based on the instrument or some documentation that outlines the minimum tick increment for various contracts? Please let me know.

[perfectinglife]

Hi,

I need and efs to tell how many decimal places the current symbol is traded in.

But now that you mention it tell the tick increment for a symbol could be very helpful.

Jerry

[perfectinglife]

I found a way to do it by putting closing price for each bar in a string, then parsing and evaluating the string, but is there a better way to tell than having to evaluated each time a bar forms?

Jerry

[perfectinglife]

Problem Solved

The following function called at the begining of the main solves the problem.

var Decimals = 2;

function main();

if (nBarState == BARSTATE_ALLBARS){ // call this to set the Decimal value prior to setting the treshold Value
Decimals = decimals()+1;
}

function decimals (){
var Cls2Str = null;
var i=0;
var len = 0;
for (i=0; i < 4; i++) {
Cls2Str = (close(i)*1).toString()
decArray = (Cls2Str).split(".");
if (decArray[1] != null){
if(decArray[1].length>len && decArray[1].length<5) len=decArray[1].length;
}
}
if (len>4) len=4;

return len;
}


So far I have not found a Future, equity or currency that trades in more than 4 decimal places, but esignal will return as many as 18 places, therefor I truncate to 4 .

Hope this helps. I has solve my problem of switching symbols in all three types.

Jerry