June 2000

Recently I created a really long term 5-minute YHOO chart by printing several charts and taping them together.  I chose a bar spacing that showed the individual bars with their opening and closing hash marks.  By having the chart occupy the full screen, each printed chart would show four days of 5-minute bars.  The chart image would be repositioned by dragging the background left or right with the mouse so each printed chart showed a different 4 day set of 5-minute bars.

The trick to the whole process is to use a constant scale range when printing charts so that all charts are scaled uniformly.  To accomplish a constant scale range, double click on the chart background to display the personal properties form for the chart.

In the Scale section, select the Use Range choice.  For my YHOO charts, I used a constant $20 scale range.  This was done by entering a High scale of 45.00 and the low scale of 25.00.  I wanted the scale grid to be labeled for each dollar increment so the interval entry is 1.00.

Not all days of YHOO plot in the scale from $45 to $25.  Still, that is not a problem.  Just drag the chart background vertically until the bars for the 4 days are nicely centered on the chart.  The slick trick is that Ensign Windows preserves the $20 scale range and the dollar interval for the grid.  Though the scale might have changed to $50 high and $30 low, this is still a $20 range.  The constant scale range makes the printed chart scales agreeable with each other so that the charts can be taped together to make a really long chart.  My taped together chart is over 8 feet long using this technique.  I use a long term chart to observe major Elliott wave patterns and cycle rhythm.

The DBC eSignal feed provides session specific futures symbols.  The regular futures symbol is a true 24 hour composite symbol.  The symbol for the Globex session will have a suffix of  =1  added.  The day session only symbol will have a suffix of  =2  added.  Example:

    SP M0      composite symbol of both sessions.
    SP M0=1  Globex only session symbol.
    SP M0=2  Day session only symbol.

You may add any or all of these symbols to the symbol list on the SetUp | Manager screen.  The symbols will post on your Ensign Windows quote pages as shown with the space and the equal sign.  Ensign Windows does not use spaces or equal signs in file names, so the file name on the hard disk will be created as illustrated in this example:

    SP M0      stores as  SP0M.
    SP M0=1  stores as  SP0M-1.
    SP M0=2  stores as  SP0M-2.

Conversion between the file name and the DBC symbol is automatic and transparent to you.

Note:  Session specific symbols require a Data Manager that is version 5.2 or later.  Currently, version 5.3 of the Data Manager is available for download from the DBC web site.