Alternate Symbol MACD Indicator for Think or Swim

I’ve been so busy, gotten sick, had work deadlines, that I’ve been away from the blog for ages. I’m making a renewed push at all my projects, so here’s an indicator that was requested by a reader: A MACD that follows an symbol independent of the symbol of the underlying chart. You could use this to plot the MACD of the VIX onto a chart of the VXX ETF for example. Or to plot the broad market SPY on an individual stock you are watching.

Anyway, here’s how to do it:

A MACD is just a distance between two moving averages. The histogram is a distance between the MACD line and a moving average of that line. So we will build our own MACD from scratch using data from the symbol we are interested in.

Traditionally, the MACD uses exponential moving averages. I don’t know that it matters, but I do prefer exponential over simple because of the way they blend out past data. So we start with the inputs for the symbol and the MACD periods:

Input symbol=”VIX”;
Input period1=12;
input period2=26;
input periodhist=9;

Next we create the two exponential averages for the MACD line:

Def exp1=expaverage(close(symbol),period1);
Def exp2=expaverage(close(symbol),period2);
Plot MACD=exp1-exp2;
Def macdma=average(MACD,periodhist);
Plot Hist=MACD-macdma;

Add some formatting and that’s it!

This indicator is free. You can download “AltMACDSTUDY.ts” from “Released Thinkscript Studies” on my Google site. Thanks for (hopefully still) reading!

Tags: macd, Thinkscript