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Time Ribbons have become extremely useful of late. There are various reasons you might at some point want to add a time ribbon. The most important reason, in my (amg) opinion is to identify missing bars.
Trading using the Box is extremely sensitive to geometry. If a bar is missing, your box/price geometry could be critically destroyed. What might be a VBT or 2Z on a proper Box might not present itself if bars are missing. Likewise, you might anticipate a return target when there is none.
There are several reasons bars go missing, the most common being that the feed drops out and the data is not properly refreshed. This is a problem most frequently encountered by traders using the IB Feed. IB forces two feed-shutdown events:
(1) The TWS Auto Logoff Time (set by the user).
(2) The IB Server forced shutdown (set by IB, typically near midnight and lasting between 30 seconds and 30 minutes)
The second reason you might add a time ribbon is to better highlight the time of day, particularly as Ensign puts a weird non-standard time on the axis for some bar spacing combinations. Additionally, some of these templates add Bar1 8, 11 colors as well as Deadzone markers.
| Template | Description | Author |
| EST3.dat | Adds a Single Line showing EST (NYC). Will also "skip" a time stamp when
data is missing. For a 10m chart only. EST Image |
Sputnik |
| Missing Bar Alert.dat | Missing Bar Alert: Time Ribbon for tracking missing bar data Read Sniffy's "how to use" description (below) |
Sniffy |
Missing Bar Alert by
Sniffy (link to chart)
This DYO will give an alert when any minute chart
is missing one or more bars. It comes in handy for me when I trade overnight,
which is when my IB feed is at its most unreliable.
The DYO will highlight the bar after the missing bar or if you prefer, it can print a big red zone across your chart on the bar after the ?missing? bar. In fact, the bar may not be missing, it may have simply not covered enough time.
You can then either fix it if you have the bar data; enter phantom data if the bar 'space' is important to you (e.g. Box traders), or of course wait and ensure that refresh fixes it.
Anyway, at least you will know early that you have data missing and can take the appropriate action.
I have tried it out on quite a few different chart times and instruments but clearly you need to establish for yourself whether it does you any good or not.
I tend not to use it during the day as my feed is more reliable then. It will not work on tick or volume charts because they have no fixed time per bar
DYO Setup (link to DYO images- in work)
On the second bar after the 1st session open, the DYO initializes the 'minutes per bar' to use as a comparator against all future bars.
It doesn't use the 1st bar because that bar will often have unreliable minutes/bar information associated with it. So instead I use the second bar. Therefore you need to ensure that bars 1 and 2 are present and correct on your chart. The DYO should look after the rest.
In addition to testing for missing time, the second DYO takes account of the 'odd lot' minute bars that you sometimes see on your charts at the next to last bar of the session.
This occurs because Ensign will slip in a bar that 'evens up' the last bar of the session to ensure that your last bar finishes at the end of session.
Whether this occurs or not will depend upon your session end time and of course on how many minutes per bar you are using.
However, the DYO would flag this bar because it does not cover 'enough' time according to the nominal minutes per bar. To avoid giving a false flag, the DYO will simply skip the test on the last bar of the first session close. So you need to make sure that second last bar is good.
That's all there is to it.
I hope it helps.
Sniffy
Traders should be knowledgeable about how to download and apply them and are referred to the Ensign Help pages for further reading.
Last Update: 30 Aug 2005
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