Excel 2010 and TOS DDE Problems

If you are having trouble with DDE links to Think or Swim with Excel 2010, and your Excel application hangs, then make sure you don’t have the Google Chrome browser running. For some weird reason, the links don’t work if Chrome is open, but if you close it then they start working again.

Status Update: Getting Email Alerts from a Thinkscript through DDE

I’ve got an Excel sheet working that will send you an email upon a cell value changing. Right now it requires a Gmail account. I’ll try to generalize it as much as I can. I plan on releasing it as a free tool when it’s done. Then you can use it in your own DDE spreadsheets. I will also incorporate it into the CAT tool for donors. And I will also update the ability to stream custom columns from TOS through DDE in all my tools, thanks to reader Allen, and put up a full tutorial to walk you through setting it up. No ETA, could be a couple of weeks.

Complex Analysis Tool (CAT): Analyzing and Recording Think or Swim DDE Data in Excel

Donors rejoice: It’s finally here! My Complex Analysis Tool (CAT) for Think or Swim. This tool is an extension of my TOS_Excel_DDE tools, with the addition of macros that record the data at time intervals you choose. I covered the full how-to on DDE linking in a previous post. An earlier version is what I used to create the plots in these two posts.

The CAT tool comes pre-configured to take the S&P 500 and calculate an Advancing / Declining Volume for the index in real time. You can get data as often as every second. If the price of a stock now is above the price at the last time step, then the volume for that stock since the last step is positive. Vice versa for down. The result is summed for the whole list and then plotted. Here’s an example plot:

You could adapt this tool to other calculations or stock watch lists. Instructions are in the file; hopefully it’s self explanatory, but I can answer any questions you may have as you try to modify it to your needs.

The CAT tool is for donors only. You can download the file “CAT_TOS_DDE_Recorder.zip” from the Donors Only folder under the “Released Tools” section on my Google Site. If you haven’t yet become a blog donor, you can do so now by clicking the donate button. Donate an amount you feel my tools are worth to you.

If you want me to make you a custom version of the CAT tool, you can also email me for a price quote. Thanks for your support!

Watching The Market Open

Just a quick follow-on to yesterday’s post on bid / ask spreads. Here’s the chart of the market opening as the spreads of all stocks on the S&P500 come closer together and liquidity comes in:

Status Update: Complex Analysis Tool (CAT) for Excel and Think or Swim

As I wrote before, I’m working on a tool for my blog donors that will allow recording of the DDE data from Think or Swim in Excel for doing time-based advanced calculations. I’ve got the data recording working now.

I put the recording logic into my example file for calculating the average bid / ask spread of the S&P500, and hooked it up to a plot. The logic records the DDE values once per second, and saves the value if it changed from the prior saved value. The plot updates in real time as the new values come in. Here’s a snapshot of the average bid / ask data for the S&P500 stocks from today, starting at about 2:15 PM ET (13:15 CT in the plot) and going until after the close:

Can you tell where the market closed without looking at the time axis? I watched it real time–it was cool to actually “see” the close unfold.

Here’s a zoomed-in view:

It was interesting to me that the spreads narrowed going into the close, indicating more trading liquidity, and then blew out after the bell as order flow stopped. Nothing too earth-shattering discovered here, but it’s a demo of the recording and plotting capability. There’s no reason you’d want to plot price in this tool–it’s only good for the kinds of things you CAN’T plot in Think or Swim. Next to come are the alerts and a couple of other things. Stay tuned!