Contents of AB-FT afl8 zip

8-27-2006

Welcome and hope you find these files of use to you

This zip files includes the following:

 

LinRegress + 2SD's.afl               8/27/2006            Fred Thomas-Two Linear Regress's. Good idea. I'll use that. Lookbacks of 100days, and 20 days. Adjust as needed.

Here's the afl for the 2 SD's I posted above:

 

LR.afl & LR.png                           8/27/2006             Fred Tonetti-Here's most of the main chart Section for Linear Regression that I use which has some added bells and whistles ... This can be included in the standard _Price.AFL if one desires to allow the plot to appear directly on the main price chart.
As you can see the plot itself works off of the range markers. It also shows a single vertical histogram where the last bar in the range is. Beyond that is an extrapolation of the L/R line and channel. It allows shows text for the Standard Deviation multiplier that is in play.

I don't have comments in the AFL so I'll explain a little of what the parameters do ...

The first parameter is simply whether or not to show the indicator.

LinReg = ParamList("Linear Regression ?", "No|Yes");

This allows color selection of the linear regression line and corresponding channel.

LRColor = ParamColor("L/R Color", colorwhite);

This allow style selection.

LRStyle = ParamStyle("L/R Style", styleLine | styleDashed, maskAll);

This is the standard deviation multiplier used to position the L/R Channel lines above and below the L/R.

SDMult = Param("Std Dev Multiplier", 2.00, 0.01, 5.00, 0.01);

This allows the top and bottom lines to be AUTOMATICALLY placed as opposed to using the fixed multiplier above.

SDAuto = ParamList("S/D Auto", "No|Yes");

Used in conjunction with SDAuto and specifies how many points over the period of the L/R to fix outside the high / low channel boundaries

SDPoints= Param("Auto Points", 1, 1, 10, 1);

Used in conjunction with SDAuto and SDPoints to specify whether points need to be found both above the + SD line and below the - SD line or only one or the other.

SDWhich = ParamList("Which Points", "Both|Either");

This specifies how many bars into the future the L/R should be extrapolated.

SDProj = Param("Projection", 0, 0, 100, 1);

The L/R Channel Lines in the above chart were fixed and drawn automatically by making SDAuto=Yes, SDPoints=1 and SDWhich=1 ... As a result you can see that one H touches to the upper L/R Channel line.

 

LR2-6.png                       8/26/2006            Fred Tonetti-I'll give you one way you can use or at least play with this ...

As you can see from the chart below at some time in May one would have decided the short term trend had changed from down to up and as a result one would be looking for places to buy bottoms as opposed to shorting tops. However, on 5/9 although there appears to be a new channel developing there is no width to it so no real way to discern where bottoms and top are being made.
LR1
 

If you reconstruct the channel with the end point being where the next high is on 5/23 now we see that there is a real channel. Two bars later price is close to the bottom of the channel i.e. a possible decent buy point. 4-5 bars later price is at the top of the channel i.e. a possible decent sell point relative to the buy point with prices then ~3% above ... LR2
 

Reconstructing the channel again using the high on 6/2 as our end point we see again 2-5 bars later we have another possible decent buy point and that half a dozen or so bars later another possible decent sell point with prices again ~3% above.LR3
 

Reconstructing the channel again using the high on 6/17 as our end point we see 4 bars later that we have another possible decent buy point LR4
 

However, when we push the chart ahead a couple of bars ... look what we see ... price action that begins to look like it is a trend reversal LR5
 

As can be seen from followup price action this was not the case ... but this would have been difficult to discern in the prior chart. LR6
 

So ... can indicators like this help us buy the dips in uptrends and/or short tops in downtrends ? ... I think so, but there are pitfalls ...

In the case above and what one would have done after seeing the next bar or two after LR4 ... if we had sold we would have had a loss but it would have been a relatively small one. If we had held we would have been rewarded by price returning to the upper channel. Was there a way to know it would have ?

It is I think instructive for those of you who are visual traders who use indicators like this to incorporate the discipline to move the chart to the left one bar at a time and note what you'd do on the right edge. Without this discipline it is way too easy to state retrospectively that oh yes I would have done this or that. Even better if you remove the dates and price scale from the chart so you really don't have a frame of reference in that regard either. For those of you who are system traders there are ways to incorporate this decision making process into your systems.

 

FT-Util.afl        9/6/2006              Ken Close-Bruce Robinson created a ft-util.afl several years ago, and I think he updated it. It has subroutines in it called PutFNU, and takes variables from AB code and creates the proper syntax/format for a FNU file.

I will list the older ft-util.afl here. Someone else can jump in and say whether there is an improved version. Actually, whether or not there is an improved version, this version writes FNU files just fine.

 

 

 

 

Download AB-FT afl8 zip