Historical candlestick charts

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Hi all,

I use a program downloaded from the net which allows you to take and either print or store screenshots as a jpg in a folder of your choice. I use CMS as one of my brokers and use this utility continually whenever I open a trade as a proof of what I did in case their server goes down and there is any argument, and it has helped my case a number of times because it shows all the information required such as time, pending orders, opened orders, current price, etc

In June of this year I began taking a screenshot on a daily basis of a close connected line 10 minute graph on the four majors as a historical record.

The screenshots are stored as jpg's, taken from a CMS chart showing the time down the bottom and the price down the right hand side.

I work mainly with cable, so I printed 3 months of the cable charts off, and took them with me when I went on holiday so that on a few of those rainy days when the fish weren't biting I could analyse them. :LOL:

I did so, and during the analysis realised that I would have been far better taking the screenshots in "candlestick view" instead of "close connected line" view, as the "candlestick view" shows the spikes, and gives far more information regarding the strength of the movement etc. I have now began taking 2 screenshots daily of each major pair - one in "closed connected view" and one in "candlestick view"

Does anybody out there do the same? And if so I would dearly love to have the historical "candlestick screenshots" for cable and the euro, but especially cable for the last few months. Or alternatively, does anybody know if there is an archive anywhere of these that can be downloaded.

A 5, 10 0r 15 minute chart would do, but anything above this will not show me the spike information that I am looking for.

Power to your fingers to press the correct "buy" or "sell" button.

Keith Mason
 
Keith

What 'spike information' are you looking for? Are you doing historical news/announcement analysis or perhaps looking for time/seasonal strategies? What's a "close connected line" view? Is that the CMS tick chart?

Steve
 
Hi Steve,

A "closed connected line" is what Netdania would call "line view". It is a continual graph line of the prices as they fluctuate throughout the day.

The problem with them is - if a currency spikes very quickly up or down for whatever reason, it will not necessarily show the spike on the line graph, (unless it remains there for a while) but it does show it on the candlestick chart no matter how short a time period, even for a single second in duration.

If you are then looking to work out how certain trading scenario's would have worked out ie - entrance/exit points from a line graph, it can be very misleading because the spike data does not show instances where the orders or stop losses may well have been activated. Neither does the simple line chart give any indication of the strength of the movement or its reversal, whilst the candlestick chart does.

The spike information is certainly important at news/announcement times, but spikes can occur at other times as well, and I am finding the information that they provide is a necessary aid for me to work out what my success/failure rate would have been according to several different trading scenarios that I am working on.

Keith


c6ackp said:
Keith

What 'spike information' are you looking for? Are you doing historical news/announcement analysis or perhaps looking for time/seasonal strategies? What's a "close connected line" view? Is that the CMS tick chart?

Steve
 
Hi Keith

Oh, I see where you are coming from now :) I can't help with your original query as the data providers that I use only offer the following:

5min - 5 days of data
15min - 10 days of data
Hourly - 30 days of data
Daily - 10 years of data

This is probably fairly typical. However, if you would like to do some free back-testing, I would recommend that you open a demo a/c with fxengines.com. You might get to learn a lot about your strategies by back-testing over several months or even a few years using the fxengines system.

You should definitely get to grips with candlestick analysis though. As you've noticed, they provide extra useful information which is hard to see on a regular (tick) graph.

Best of luck
Steve
 
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