Thinkscript Chat Room Comes to Think or Swim

Today I got word from Think or Swim of a new resource for Thinkscript users and developers. The ToS folks are listening to the requests of their customers for more Thinkscript support. Within the next two weeks, there will be a new chat room inside of the Think Desktop platform covering the topic of Thinkscript! The idea is to build a ToS sanctioned community where people can share ideas and scripts, or just ask for help. It will be moderated by ToS. They plan to have free chat times, and also have the occasional presenter talk about a certain topic of interest like they do in the other rooms in Think Desktop.

As you may know, I tried to put up a little discussion board, but there wasn’t enough interest. I know that there are sporadic groups of folks on the yahoo boards, or communities at sites like Thinkscripter’s. Hopefully having a centrally located area will gather more people together. I think it will also be a good place to make requests for new features in the Thinkscript language and report any bugs that we see.

I see any attention given to Thinkscript from inside ToS as a big positive, since the management types don’t necessarily see it as a big profit center. The more we as customers show up and support the work of the ToS dev team, the more firepower they have to get resources to bring us more capability.

So look for this in your Think Desktop platform soon!

Volatility-Based Trailing Stop Strategies for Think or Swim

Here is my Volatility-Based Trailing Stop indicator implemented as strategies. These are only exit strategies at the moment, so if you use long and short entry strategies of your choice, these will stop you out if the corresponding trailing stop is breached.

These files are free. Download “VolatilityTS_Strategies.zip” from “Released Thinkscript Strategies” on my Google site.

Fixed Stop Loss and Profit Target Strategies for Think or Swim

As promised, here are four strategies showing how to implement fixed stop losses and fixed profit targets for TOS. You need to add these to a chart with some entry strategy. I have included two example entries for you to test out if you want. These are called “Justbuy” and “Justsell”. If there are two green bars in a row, it goes long. If two red bars in a row, it goes short. Otherwise, the targets and stops manage the trade.

You can run a backtest on it to see the results, and play with the stops and targets to see if it improves (or worsens!). To me, this is a good quick way to test if you have any edge in an idea. If there is one, it will show up right away in a simple test. If it takes fancy tools and algorithms to squeeze out a drop of an edge, but you don’t have direct market connections and 8+ figures of capital to employ it, then you are fooling yourself and asking for pain.

These strategies are free. Download “Fixed Stops and Targets.zip” from “Released Thinkscript Strategies” on my Google site. As always, leave a comment if you have any questions or need help setting them up!

Cumulative Tick Study (v2) for Think or Swim

Here’s the v2 for my cumulative tick study. See the prior post for the full explanation of what it is doing and why.

Changes:
I include the trend correction automatically. I took the paintbars out. The “ema” input is now called “smooth” for clarification.

New inputs:
“Filter”–for the high and low bands, you can filter on a minimum tick level such that the bands don’t overweight small adverse tick values after a pronouced move. Basically, if you think +-300 on the NYSE tick is “noise”, then enter 300.
“Symbol”–you can use any symbol you want: $TICK, $TICKQ, $TIKI or anything else.

You can also hide the cumulative tick plot or show it. If you show it, you get a plot that looks like this:

If you hide it (default) then you get a chart like this, where you can see the detail of each tick reading:

The color of the dots shows you the color of the cumulative tick, just the same as if you were showing the cumtick plot. Usually, we don’t care about the absolute value anyway, just the trend of it, so this is default. The values of the dots are the values of the trend correction that is being added into the cumulative tick number. Confusing? I hope not, but leave a comment if so.

I did some cleanup to the indicator, so the tick bars now plot the actual high and low values like a regular price-based bar, not just a flat out histogram from 0 to the value. Basically, you’ll see some black gaps if the low of the tick was positive, or the high of the tick was negative. Just aesthetics. If your chart background is not black, then change the colors of the “hib” and “lob” plots to match your background.

Finally, there is a little white dash on the most recent bar showing the “last” value of the tick, so you can see in real time where its printing. After the fact it just shows the closing value at the last bar of the day.

This version is free. Download “CumTickv2STUDY.ts” from my Google site under “Released Thinkscript Studies“.

Average Range By Time Study for Think or Swim

Here’s an adaptation of the Average Volume by Time indicator that a donor wanted me to make. He generously allowed me to share the script with you all. All it does differently is plot the average range of each bar at a particular time over the length of the plot. So if you plot a 20 day, 5 min chart, the first value is the average range of the first 5 min bar over the last 20 days. You can also see what the averages are for past days by turning the “onlytoday” input to “No”. The “alertlevel” input is not connected to an actual alert, it just paints the range bar cyan if you are above that level, yellow if below the “alertlevel” but above the average, and gray if below. The default of 50 means that if the range is more than 50% greater than the average range for that bar, it will be cyan, between +50% and equal to average it is yellow, and less than average it is gray.

This indicator is free because of donor sponsorship. You can download “AverageRangeByTimeSTUDY.ts” from “Released Thinkscript Studies” at my Google site. Enjoy!