qlink can't provide bollinger band data

[bowlesj3]

Hi, my first post to this forum rather than the old yahoo qcharts email group. Gee, not much space. Here is the problem.

I am writing an MS-Access program to provide bollinger band info to me in an organized format to assist me with my trades. I need this data for 1, 5, 10, 15, 30, 60 and daily bar charts. I only need it for the current snapshot (no history). Therefore a snapshot would provide current price and the value of all 3 bands (upper, middle and lower) for each of those chart sizes. This is 7 X 3 = 21 items of bollinger band info per snapshot plus the current price. I downloaded Qlink and after reading the readme file it seems that this information can not be provided by Qlink. I can write my MS-Access program in such a way that manual entry is possible but I would prefer to avoid this obviously. Does anyone know of a way to get this data out of qcharts into a .csv file or tab separated file so I can have my MS-Access program grab that file and process it? Ideal format would be (price, L01, M01, U01, L05, M05, U05, L10, M10, U10, L15, M15, U15, L30, M30, U30, L60, M60, U60, Ldaily, Mdaily, Udaily). Ultimately qlink would need to determine what charts are running in the workspace just incase a user decided to put in the weekly bar chart. I need the data every 1 or 2 minutes. If I could click a single button on Qlink and click a button on my MS-Access Program to complete the task this would be ideal.

I personally think that anything in that Qcharts data box should be available in a csv or tab separated file and Qlink should be smart enough to know which bar charts are open at the moment and grab the databox data from all of them in increasing bar size sequence. Okay, that is programmers opinion. Actually I think this should be a button on the new Qcharts specialized tool bar (the one the customer customizes - It has one right? Yah and single click too!)

Thanks, John.

[JayF]

John,

Thanks for your post. QLink can provide historical bar data into Excel for the intervals you require, however the calculations for Bollinger Bands would need to be done within Excel. This can be done fairly easily with either direct cell references/calculations or with VBA. The calculation for Bollinger Bands can be found here. You may even be able to find some pre-made Excel or VBA formulas on the web, so this doesn't have to be created by hand.

Regarding the ability for QLink to interface with QCharts for symbol and interval linking, that would be a great feature to have. We'll add it to the list of improvements for the next version of QLink.

[bowlesj3]

Thanks Jay, for the info on how to calculate the bollinger band within excel. However that would be impractical for my purpose since I would have to do a lot of extra manual work I don't have time for during the trading day. The reasons is I often, within Qcharts, make adjustments to the bollinger band settings as John Bollinger points out one should do. The idea I have is to make this adjustment within Qcharts for any of the chart sizes (1, 5, 10, 15, 30, 60 or daily) as I do now every day and several times a day and have these adjusted snapshot values automaticlly presented via the "data window" or "snapshot bar" to my MS-Access program via the csv snapshot file(or files). Putting separate calcs for the bands with MS-ACCESS would require I double up on this adjusting John Bollinger recommends (by the way he is correct in his recommendation according to my experience). I think my idea of having Qlink write out data from any of the data windows that are present on a cycle presented as a prarameter by the user (every X number of seconds as they require) is a feature many on your lists could make use of even with excel since it can read in csv files etc. I know Excel fairly well but it isn't suited to my needs. MS-Access is.

This forum is better than email lists except I can't find a spell check which I need badly.

Thanks,
John.

[JayF]

Thanks John for the reply. Pulling data out of QCharts wouldn't be an easy task for the current QLink (it currently goes directly to the servers for all its requests.) However, adding DDE support for the major studies in QCharts could be doable. I'll add this to the list of items to consider for QLink's future enhancement.

[JayF]

One other quick note, we do already have a product that can do everything you need of it. eSignal has a programming language built into it that can export bar and study data via DDE on a real-time basis. Here's some links for your perusal.

http://kb.esignalcentral.com/article.asp?article=1070&p=4

http://kb.esignalcentral.com/article.asp?article=2228&p=4

EFS Help Center

[bowlesj3]

Billinger Band wish has to be a Qcharts Enhancement.

Thanks Jay,

Actually this is a Qcharts enhancement. Qlink is not suited for other reasons too. See paragraphs 2 & 3.

Your Esignal script language would be okay if it allows me to make a band adjustment in Qcharts (for example changing the number of bars from standard 20 bars to 17 bars and adjusting the deviation from 2.0 to 2.5) then I see visually in the Qchart plots that it is a correct reflection of the current price trend then I now click some sort of button or something from your EFS programming language that causes it to go out to all my Qchart Data windows and grab all those current Bollinger band values for all charts currently showing in those windows (I currently use 1, 5, 10, 15, 30, 60, daily, weekly) and fire them out to a ".csv" or ".tab separated" file where I could pick them up in MS-Access (excel is not powerful enough). If it can do this on demand only when I need it rather than every few seconds which is a waist of computer time it is of great value to me. If it can not do this, it is of little value to me and it is better I don't dig in to your language since I am exceptionally busy like most. Again my concern is I do not want to have to adjust band settings in Qcharts then duplicate this effort in some other place.

I think this export needs to be a Qcharts function. Here is why. In Qcharts when I go back and put the cursor on a specific bar from he past in the minute bar chart all the data windows line up. I do this often to get a fix on the bollinger band value at that time to do offset estimates. It would be perfect if the right click at this point which pulls up (export, data) could also have an item (export, data windows) which would export every one of them to a single file in .csv or tab separated format. So it would be the same function but based upon a selected historic bar rather than the very last bar that is being currently built this minute in real time. In summary, two functions (export all data windows for the current minute bar being built & export all data windows for the historic bar which I currently have highlighted). So when exporting the "currently being built bar" it would in effect pop the cursor to that bar at the moment I clicked and instantly take a snapshot of all data displaying in the data windows at that point in time (RSI included). Actually the current bar being built data would be the same data showing along the right hand side price scale (RSI included). Date and time is not of use to me but I am sure someone could find a use for it (actually my program could use the trade time to determine if the charts had fallen too far behind the automic clock). My MS-Access program would have a different button to click if I had exported the data windows from a past minute bar rather than the current minute bar. Of note, I just realized that when I place the cursor on the current minute bar, the data window is not constantly updated with the current price. That isn't really a problem for my purposes. I am trying to do this all manually now so a small delay is not a big deal. My use for this data is to get an estimate on where I am going to take entry and exit and I obviously am going to be doing this a few minutes before my entry point occurs. Prices can stall and I may go in a bit early too. Actually on second thought my export of this data would be very frequent (like 100 to 300 a day) so it would be best to have a special button for single click to get the current bar exports out. Lastly on 3rd thought if Qcharts could be set up to export the current bar data windows including RSI on an every 5 seconds or so basis based upon the user settings my MS access program could also be set up with a timer to go and get this data at the same number of seconds (every form can have a timer in access and it can be changed by program control). So what I would do is most of the time have my MS-Access grid doing an automatic grab of the export so I get a warning when an RSI level gets to a certain point. When bands are reached or near my MS-Access program could also set off alarms if both Qcharts and my program are set for automatic operation. When I go into that form to poke around doing manual updates the timer would be turned off until I was done. So to summarize (3 variations: 1/ constant every X seconds export of all data windows reflecting the current bar, 2/ on demand export reflecting current bar, 3/ export reflecting a past highlighted bar).

On other thing. This CSV file should probably have the symbol in it. I guess each data window set of data would have to have the symbol at the front. So in fact this idea is a Qcharts enhancement idea rather than a Qlink idea. It would be important that the export sequence always be the same for all chart data windows. To export each one separately would be way too slow so somehow Qcharts would have to Order them maybe based upon a parameter list somewhere.

My specific use will be export E-mini S&P500 then every so often export the Canadian Futures SXF. Both are in different work spaces. There is no mixing of symbols. I have found it very unwise to use the action of one symbol to predict the action of another symbol unless they are directly physically correlated.

On thing about this forum. I just did about 50 to 100 updates to this reply because the window is too small for proof reading properly. The number of views should not reflect my proof reading but it does.

By the way thanks for your quick responses. It seems you are great at what you do.

John.
One last entry (I hope). I have most of my ideas and approaches mapped out for this MS-Access program. It is pretty much a must have in my opinion. If you can sneak these changes (especially the automatic writing out of data window info) into the new release somehow I will likely stay with Qcharts. Otherwise I strongly doubt it. As far as email lists go I will probably do a few internet searchs as part of this project in finding the software and getting a pricing on it all.

[bowlesj3]

One little extra which is an old old request I had actually. If the feature of writing out snapshot info of the data wondows is made available (on demand, on a regular user specified basis & for a historic highlighted bar) then it would be good to write out both the trade time and the current PC clock time. This would allow my program to detect if Qcharts has fallen too far behind the execution software and my program would sound an alarm (10 seconds is getting too much). I feel that Qcharts should do that already (it really is very important since this delay problem can lead to bad prices on entry and exit if the trader does not notice a very recent delay in the charting software - a constant threat for sure). I think that the regular writing of this data window data should be possible every 4 or 5 seconds. In my case I would want to overlay the file rather than append to it. However some users may want an append function. I could make use of it actually I suppose. One comment about this generally. I think you loose a lot of traders who are also programmers (or good scripters) because you don't have these types of features in Qcharts. I won't mention the product names. Most are long gone I think and are not interested in this forum.

[JayF]

Re: Billinger Band wish has to be a Qcharts Enhancement.

Thanks John for the detailed posts and private messages. Based on time constraints, I don't see these making it into QCharts 6.0 (the feature list is locked down at this point and we are only working on bug fixes.) I can see the value in enhancing QCharts export functionality. We'll take these feature suggestions into consideration for a future release of QCharts.

Originally posted by bowlesj3
...So to summarize (3 variations: 1/ constant every X seconds export of all data windows reflecting the current bar, 2/ on demand export reflecting current bar, 3/ export reflecting a past highlighted bar)....