April 2002

One of the patrons of the NQ/ES Pals chat room is David Shedd.  He maintains a very informative web site where NQ and ES traders from the chat room post chart images showing their analysis.  The web site address is http://www.dacharts.com/    You definitely need to go to this web site and read the educational material about trading systems, Pyrapoint, and view the library of chart examples posted by various contributors.   Each day a new chart folder is added where charts are posted during the day to show live market analysis by various traders.

Here is one example of the type of analysis posted by traders to the www.dacharts.com website.

Past issues of the Trading Tips newsletter has extolled the benefits of using the Pyrapoint tool, and of watching moon phases.   Here is a current chart showing profound correlation of the Pyrapoint End-of-Square and the Full Moon occurring at the same time, and how very depressed cattle futures have responded.

For more information on the Pyrapoint tool read the January 2001 issue of the Trading Tips newsletter.
For more information on Moon Phases read the February 2001 issue of the Trading Tips newsletter.

Several changes and additions were made recently to the already popular Ensign Windows charting program.  They make Ensign Windows unequaled in the flexibility and power of its studies and draw tools.

1) Tabs:  Each Study and Draw Tool now has 14 unique settings that can be saved.  The properties window for each study and tool displays several tabs at the bottom of the screen.  The  'Default'  tab contains the default settings which is used when a new study or tool is added to a chart.  Whenever you select the  'Use as Default'  checkbox (when viewing any tab), the settings will be copied to the  'Default'  tab.  This enables you to either change the default settings directly, or update the defaults from another tab (by checking the 'Use as Default' checkbox).  Click on one of the tabs to view or change the settings.   This allows you to have many unique settings for each study and tool.

2) Markers and Line Styles:  Each Study and Draw Tool can now be drawn with markers.  There are also several new line styles and line thicknesses.  The markers include arrows, circles, letters, numbers, prices, dates, bar counters, percentages, bar highlighting, histograms, and many shapes.  The markers can be placed on the left and right sides of each Draw Tool line.

The markers can also be drawn on Study lines.  The following example shows how to draw a Stochastic study line with different colors and  'Star' markers when the study gets above 80 or below 20.

Other examples: An RSI study can highlight bars on a chart (with color) when the RSI value gets below 20.  Or, the spread between two Moving Average lines can be drawn with various histogram styles and colors.  In summary, the added flexibility of markers can really enhance all the studies and draw tools.

3) Draw Tools:  The properties window for Draw Tools now has up to 11 rows of line parameters that can be specified.  Each row has a check box to show a line (uncheck the box to hide a line).  Each line can have unique percentage levels, colors, styles, and markers (for both left and right sides of the line).  The following example shows a Fibonacci Levels properties window.  The tool will draw Fibonacci lines with various percentage levels and colors.  A marker is placed on the left side of each Fibonacci line to print the '%' percent level of the line.  A marker is placed on the right side of each Fibonacci line to print the '$' price level of each line.

One customer summarized his opinion in saying, "The tools for visualization are shaping up to be light years ahead of anything else out there."  -N. Ali  04-25-2002

4)  All the Moving Averages have been combined into 1 Study in Ensign Windows.  The calculation formula can be specified as either Simple, Exponential, Weighted, or Smoothed.  This gives you 4 different types of moving average studies.

5)  The  MACD Exponential and  MACD Simple studies have been combined into 1 study.  The calculation formulas can be specified as either Simple, Exponential, Weighted, or Smoothed averages so you have 4 different types of MACD studies.

6)  All  ESPL  RUN  buttons have been moved to a central window.   Click the  RUN  button on the toolbar to open the window.  There are no longer ESPL run buttons at the bottom of the Studies list, ColorBars list, and DrawTools panel.  The captions for all these RUN buttons can be changed by using the   btnESPL0  -  btnESPL59  commands.  For example:   btnESPL51.caption:='MyStudy';  will change the caption on button 51.

7)  Ensign Windows performs powerful Market Statistics analysis.  This feature was the subject of the March 2002 Trading Tips newsletter.  

8)  All menus and button bars have been redesigned to be docking toolbars.  Buttons used infrequently can be removed from the toolbars.  This image shows the main menu, workspace tabs, two docked toolbars and two floating toolbars.

9)  Other New features:  Donchian Channels, Price Magnet, Line Draw Mode, Square of Nine Levels, Schiff Lines, Play Back feature, large file sizes up to 65534 bars, and the transfer of draw lines to other time frames.

Part I

This article is a review of some of the features and the power of ESPL; the programming language provided with Ensign Windows.  I should mention that I have been programming for over 20 years, and as such, this article is written by a programmer, for programmers.  Before I chase all the non-programmers away, let me point out that, like all aspects of Ensign Windows, ESPL can be used in many ways.  It is very possible to write useful tools in just a few simple lines of ESPL. So if you want to learn just enough ESPL, to be able to whip off a simple 5 line indicator, or a new way to color bars, ESPL can do it.  On the other hand, if you want to write a series of complex computations, requiring several charts and timeframes, remembering prior computations and generating multiple forms of output; well then, ESPL can do that too.

Before getting started, I’ll mention that my outline for this article could result in a small novel, rather than an article.  Therefore the plan is to break it into pieces, with subsequent parts in future issues of this newsletter.

Before writing the first line of ESPL, there are a few concepts that are foundational in ESPL, that should be understood.  The first of these is that Ensign uses, at most, one ESPL file (aka script or program) at a time.  However, that script may contain the code for any number of studies.  In addition, the physical file that is specified to the ESPL compiler may reference other files, whose content are read by the compiler.  This allows your script to be extremely large, while still allowing the programmer to segment and manage the code.

The ESPL Editor window, in addition to providing a text editor, controls when the code is running (the Run button) and when it is not (the editing check box). Clicking in the editor window stops all ESPL code from running.  Clicking the Run button will compile the code, and if error free, allow the code to run.  Notice that ESPL is compiled, enabling your code to run much faster than otherwise.  It is important to note that the compiler only allows for backward referencing.  That is, any reference to a variable or procedure, must occur after that variable or procedure has already been declared.

There are several features in Ensign Windows that can make use of ESPL code.  These include:

Before I proceed, let me give you a moment to ponder the massive flexibility of this list.

ESPL uses a built-in global variable, called ESPL (called Who in old versions of Ensign Windows) , to determine which of these invocation methods has been used.  Each study, button, function key, etc. will invoke the ESPL code, with a different ESPL value.  (Refer to the ESPL documentation of the ESPL variable for specific values).

Some of the invocation methods, such as studies, may invoke the ESPL script for every tick or at the close of each bar.  A check box in the study’s properties window selects this setting.  Of course, studies that are called on every tick, will require more processing power, than studies that are called only at the end of the bar.  To be accurate, the study is actually called on the first tick of the new bar, rather than the last tick of the finished bar.

When ESPL code for a study, drawing tool or color bar study is called (invoked), there are some other global variables that define the context in which the code runs.  An Ensign chart exists in a window, and so, the global variable Window identifies the window (and thus the chart) that owns the study; for which the script is being called.  Chart information, by default, is obtained for the current window.  It is possible for the code to change the Window variable, and thus obtain information about other windows/charts.  There is also the concept of the current study; which is the study for which the code was invoked.  Methods that access study information, take a parameter that specifies the study.  The current study is referred to by the value zero.

The global built-in variables BarBegin and BarEnd are basically indices into the array of bars displayed in a chart.  BarBegin is the left most (or oldest) bar, and BarEnd is the right most (or newest) bar.  When Ensign needs the ESPL study to process all of the bars in the chart, then these variables are not equal, and encompass the range of bars in the chart.  Subsequent calls to the ESPL script, made for new bars in the chart, are called with these two variables being equal, and identifying the newest bar.  Thus the code can identify an initialization invocation by comparing these values for non-equality.

For reasons of both size and subject matter, this is a good place to stop. Next time, we will look at some of the key aspects of a programming language, that are incorporated in ESPL.