New Plugins           

Erlanger Value Lines (EVL)

Erlanger Value Lines are designed to indentify key levels for the intraday trader. These levels fall into three categories: Support/Resistance, Extreme, and Opening values. From a practical point of view, these levels act as targets and triggers for short-term trades. It is uncanny how these levels stop or turn back short-term price swings:

Support/Resistance levels are re-calculated each day based upon the previous day's trading. There are three lines in this category: support (green), resistance (red) and pivot (magenta.) The colors as well as the thickness of these lines are user configurable. Right click on a chart window that has the Erlanger Value Lines plugin installed and select the "Support" tab:

Extreme levels reflect the final 2-hour high and final 2-hour low from the previous day's trading. The colors as well as the thickness of these lines are user configurable. Right click on a chart window that has the Erlanger Value Lines plugin installed and select the "Extremes" tab:

There are two user configurable opening levels in this plugin. The defaults are set to reflect the close of the first 1-minute bar and first 5-minute bar of regular trading. The user can change these to reflect the desired period(s) for the opening bar, the color of each bar. There is also a checkbox option to display one, both or none of these lines. Right click on a chart window that has the Erlanger Value Lines plugin installed and select the "Open Lines " tab:

Erlanger Trend Direction (ETD)

Erlanger Trend Direction is a proprietary indicator used to measure the coincident trend underway. There are four "states" to this indicator: uptrend (green), correction or pullback within an uptrend (yellow above the "zero" line), downtrend (red) and correction or rally within a downtrend (yellow below the "zero" line.)

The colors as well as the long title display are user configurable. Right click on a chart window that has the Erlanger Trend Direction plugin installed:

Acceleration Bands

Acceleration Bands, recently popularized by Price Headley of BigTrend.com fame, serve as a trading envelope that factor in a stock's typical volatility over standard settings of 20 or 80 bars. They can be used across any time frame, though Headley prefers to use them most across weekly and monthly timeframes as breakout indicators outside these bands, while using the shorter time frames to define likely support and resistance levels at the lower and upper Acceleration Bands. Acceleration Bands are plotted around a simple moving average as the midpoint, and the upper and lower bands are of equal distance from this midpoint:

To find out more about acceleration bands, visit: http://www.bigtrends.com/document.jsp?documentid=59

The band length, colors as well as the band display are user configurable. Right click on a chart window that has the Acceleration Bands plugin installed:

DMA Oscillator

A "displaced" moving average (DMA) is simply a normal moving average shifted to the right or left. A displaced moving average can be computed based upon a stock's closing price, high price and/or low price.

A short-term DMA setup popularized by Tom Joseph (Trading Techniques, Inc.) involved 2 DMA averages. These 2 averages form a channel that make clear any trend change event, as well as the strength of a trend underway. The first average is a 6-day average of price highs displaced 4 places to the right. The second is a 6-day average of price lows displaced 4 places to the right.

DMAs by themselves are not intended as buy and sell signals. Rather, DMAs are best applied as short-term "triggers" and as short-term trend "monitors" in conjunction with other, independent indicators.

A "trigger" occurs when price moves across one or both DMA lines - the DMA channel. "Monitor" status occurs when a trend is underway. For example, if there is an upturn in price, we look for price to stay above the DMA channel. We are also concerned with the slope of the channel. The steeper the slope of the DMA channel, the more powerful the advance phase. This brings us to the heart of the matter. Stocks generally transit from advance phase to decline phase and back to advance phase - so on and so on. How the current phase unfolds can set up the tone of the next phase… if an advance phase is mediocre, the next decline phase is more likely to be nasty. If a decline phase in mild, this could setup a stronger advance. The DMA helps in monitoring the tone of the current advance phase.

The DMA Oscillator has three states. When it is a positive number, it measures the amount current price is above the DMA channel. When it is "zero", price is within the DMA channel. When it is a negative number, it measures the amount current price is below the DMA channel. Colors indicate these states, and a label on the scale of the DMA Oscillator indicates price as "above" or "below" the DMA channel.

The properties dialog lets the user select the parameters for the DMA channel and the colors for the oscillator and signal shades. There is also a filter capability that allows the user to delay the change of either buy or sell signal by X periods.

True Strength Index (TSI)

As highlighted in Bill Blau's book Momentum, Direction and Divergence, the True Strength Index (TSI) is a double smoothed momentum indicator. Through the use of two sequential exponential moving averages, the TSI yields "low lag, smooth curves which also show trending characteristics of price."

Directional Trend Index (DTI)

As highlighted in Bill Blau's book Momentum, Direction and Divergence, the Directional Trend Index (DTI) is a double smoothed direction indicator. Through the use of high/low momentum (HLM), the DTI determines increasing momentum of the highs in a rising market and decreasing momentum of the lows in a declining market:

The DTI moves above and below a "zero" line. The slope of the DTI is a determinant of the direction of price. We have added a color study that reflects the slope of the DTI, as well as its position above and below the "zero" line:

The properties dialog lets the user select the parameters for the DTI, the colors for the index and the "zero" line. There is also a color background study that allows the user to see the slope and status of the DTI:

The above dialog also allows the user to filter the color study for minor slope changes at direction reversals. If the "Values must change by" box is checked, the colors will not change unless the change of direction surpasses the value entered. This helps eliminate whipsaws - compare the EK chart below with the EK chart above:

Ergodic Oscillator (EO)

As highlighted in Bill Blau's book Momentum, Direction and Divergence, the Ergodic Oscillator (EO) is a double smoothed True Strength Index (TSI) with a signal line.

The ergodic is intended to act like a stochastic indicator without the "compression" often seen with stochastics at extremes. As a result, the Ergodic helps to register long trends in prices:

The properties dialog lets the user select the parameters for the EO, the colors for the index and the signal line. There is also a histogram study that allows the user to display, overlay and color the EO histogram: