Class: 11-28-07 Forex and SPI Market Hours

Thanksgiving:

I hope everyone had an enjoyable Thanksgiving Holiday with family and friends.  My holiday was spent in Colorado with the in-laws and we had a wonderful gathering of most of the family.  My drive to Colorado on Tuesday night was through 300 miles of a snowy winter storm, and my son who was 4 hours ahead of me on the Interstate 80 was stuck for 1.5 hours between Rawlins and Laramie because of an accident that closed the freeway.  However, the freeway was open again by the time I got to the same place around Elk Mountain.  But with slower driving speeds, my arrival was at 3:30 am instead of an expected 2 am.  The return home was on bare roads, fortunately, and everyone made it safely both ways.

Recent Improvements:

The new Ensign continues to be polished off and improved.   A couple of fixes recently make upgrading to the current version pretty important if you use the new Ensign.   The 11-28 version has been released, and you can check the What's New page on the web site for details of recent changes.   http://ensign.editme.com/whatsnew

We have over 1000 users on the new Ensign now, and the bubble of increased support burden from so many transitioning to the new Ensign has pretty well passed through the system by now.   My apology to anyone who had a long wait time on the phone, or delay in getting your e-mail replied to, or delay in getting your reported issues addressed and resolved.   My excellent staff has great capacity and knowledge, but there is a limit to how much time we all have, and recently we have been stretched to capacity in trying to keep up.   Some requests have been declined that we might otherwise have responded to.   And the necessity of declining is all a matter of available time, and the priorities on our plates that demand out attention.

There have been issues lately with the FXCM feed that needed Mike's expertise to investigate and resolve with the server that provides this feed to our customers.   Thank you Mike for your speedy response and improvements made to the FXCM feed.   One of the improvements in the works for months and finally released with the FXCM feed was to handle starting and stopping boundaries for the refresh request.   In the past, the refresh would be from a beginning time boundary through the current time, which might be more than was wanted.  Now that we have the database design, it makes more efficient use of the FXCM refresh to get a needed chunk of data back in time, say a week ago, instead of getting everything since then as well, which might be a duplication of what was already in the database.

A couple weeks ago I found and resolved a memory leak, that might have been the cause of 'Out of Memory' errors that were occasionally experienced and reported.   Since that fix was put in place, I am not aware of any continuation of users reporting 'Out of Memory' errors..... so hopefully that has been fully resolved.

If you have a particular issue, it would help me to have the workspace file sent to me attached to an e-mail with a description of the problem.  Provide as many details as possible such as the version date of the program, the data feed used, the vendor used for a refresh, chart symbol and time frame, etc.   I can then investigate by running the workspace with the data feed used by the user, and see for myself what the issue might be.

As implied in my earlier comments, I just need more time to get everything done that I would like to do.  Another important fix was to an issue where some users reported some wrong prices on some charts.   I thought the issue might be crossing of an inbound refresh, but have since discovered that the mix up was caused by the Auto Add Symbols option on the Setup | Manager form.   If a chart was opened for a symbol not on the manager list, the symbol added to the list was causing the pointer to become crossed.   A visit to the Setup | Manager list would heal the pointer relationships, and all would be well until a new chart for new symbol caused the problem again.   Once I found how to cause the problem and repeat it, the fix was then easy to implement, and that was done in yesterday's version.

New Features Documentation: 

http://ensign.editme.com/c070815

I have reworked many of the pages that document the new Ensign Features.  Material on a topic has been gathered together to a single page that might have originally been give out in different training classes.  A good example is the material on Grids.....  So Use this page and its links to go to the documentation on a topic like Grids.   All the Grids material is now on a single page instead of sprinkled in multiple classes.

The Classes in the index has been renamed with New Ensign: topic.   You will find them in the N category of the index.  It did not seem logical to continue to have dates on particular titles because I started moving content around to organize it by topic, such as gather all the Database discussion to a single Database page, and all the Grid discussion to a single Grid page.

Convert Old Playback Files: 

Q:  I would like to do playback of some days from last August.  Now that the old playback files are not useful, is there any solution to this problem?

A:  The old playback files can be used, and are still useful..... they need to be converted into the tick database files.  A discussion on the feature that converts them is at the bottom of this web page.  http://ensign.editme.com/c071113   See the section about Importing Playback Files.

Pause During Draw Tool Construction: 

Q:  Periodically I have a problem where data is updating and the price arrow is moving up and down, but the bars are not building. I do a quick refresh and they start moving again. Have others reported this problem?

A:  Let me explain what you are seeing.  We had feedback of users having difficulty in placing draw tools because the chart would move on them, or blink, etc.  So the solution ended up being a simple one, yet an effective one.   That solution was to stop moving the chart sideways while you are drawing a tool, and the pencil cursor is showing.  When you finished construction or placement of the tool, then the chart will repaint with all bars showing and all studies recalculated, so nothing was missed.  This effect is similar to if you had slide the chart rightwards so the current bar was not on the chart.  It is just a pause to the visual update while you do the draw lines, and is not a pause to processing the feed or updating studies and alerts.  A refresh of the chart is unnecessary.

Forex Market Hours:

Q:  If you get an opportunity, can you give any insight into how to set up Forex symbols so daily price lines would go back to 17:00 eastern rather than 00:00?  Ideally, I want to look at it like 1 - 24 hour session.

A:  OK, let me do that now on something like the EUR/USD+ 5-min chart.

Here is the property form for the DPL for things like Today Open, Y-High, Y-Low, T-High, T-Low, and the chart looks correctly labeled to me.  In particular look at where the OP for today's open extends from.  It is from 17:00 on the 27th, which is correct.  Key to all this is having correct market hours for the chart so the program knows when to transition from Yesterday to Today at 17:00 in the afternoon.

Q:  I have used that & it looks like it is telling it to start the day at 01:00.

A:  Not so.  The boundary is from evening session open which is 17:00 through same time next day.

SPI Market Hours:

Q:  Look at the histogram it is messed up.  Looks like 2 different sessions.  All I want is the day session.

A:  The issue will resolve itself by using different market hours.  Use the following, please.

Let me explain one thing.  You need to use the hours I showed you in the above post.  The table is designed internally for storing everything in Eastern zone time, and as such, when it is Monday morning in Sydney, it happens to be Sunday evening in the Eastern zone.  Therefore the table has to use Evening Session hours and Sunday times.  This will equate to Monday times when converted to Sydney zone.  So you need to uncheck the Day Session Only so you have access to Sunday evening hours Eastern zone time.   The day is from the evening open, through the day session close, and the example has it all correctly set up to do just that.

The 24 hour histogram will be from evening open through day close, for a single histogram.  The 16:30 Day Session Open time is just a wraparound boundary from the Sunday to the Monday.   It goes right across that 16:30 and can be ignored.
Also be sure to uncheck that Day Session Only box on the form.