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Have you ever wanted to work with upcoming economic events in MultiCharts, such as getting an alert when a certain economic release was about to happen? Perhaps you even wished for an way to close strategy positions a given number of minutes before an economic new release?
Introducing the Economic Events Collection for MultiCharts
Those wishing days are over with the Economic Events Collection for MultiCharts, which is a collection of functions to work with future and historical economic events.
The Economic Events Collection was designed for flexibility and usability – giving it endless possibilities while keeping the amount of code required to an absolute minimum.
For whom might the Economic Events Collection for MultiCharts be useful?
If you’re an automated trader and want to close open positions 10 minutes before a high impact economic event is released;
If you’re a discretionary trader and don’t want to be caught off guard with important economic releases or speeches and summits about market moving topics;
If you’re an option trader and want to open volatility-based option strategies (like straddles and strangles) in the 30 minutes before important, market moving news;
If you’re a backtester and want to backtest the market reactions on certain historical economic events, or just don’t want to hold a position when a historical economic event happened (like a Non-Farm Payroll release).
Using the Economic Events Collection
To start using the Economic Events Collection for MultiCharts, download the zip file from the downloads section (which contains all the files you’ll need) and follow the easily-to-follow steps in the thorough 23-page manual (attached to this post).
An example indicator that uses the Economic Events Collection for MultiCharts can be found here.
Support and getting help
If you run into difficulties or getting stuck repeatedly, add your question/problem to this thread and I’ll try my best to help you.
Also, if you have any suggestion for improvements, I’d be grateful if you shared them here so that the Economic Events Collection can be further expanded and improved.
Thanks
I want to give a big thanks to @Nicolas11 for helping me make this project a reality and creating an impressive Java program. Thanks Nicolas, without your help this project would never even have started.
This indicator plots a text box on the chart with the upcoming economic events:
In this screenshot, taken on 15:56 local time (Western-Europe), you can see that Geithner was about to speak in 4 minutes (a Medium impact event) and the business inventories were also announced in four minutes.
The indicator has the following settings:
Most of these settings are self-explanatory. The 'TicksOffSetBottom' is the number of ticks you want the text box be displayed above the lowest value on the price scale. The 'RecalcAfter' is the number of seconds the box is updated - this is included to prevent excessive updating from MultiCharts to keep everything running smoothing.
Important note: You'll need the Economic Events Collection for MultiCharts (see first post in this thread and download here) to work with this indicator.
first of all, thanks to everybody involved in this great tool !!!
This saves a lot of manual work.
I have one problem, after installing it in the 64 bit beta of MC.
The Indicator just pops up for a few seconds in my chart and then disappears again.
Every time when i add it to a chart or turn it on or off it repeats the same pattern, appearing for a few seconds
and then disappearing again.
That sounds like an annoying problem. How does it disappear - does it so silently or gives it an error message and then turns itself off? If so, what's the error message? You probably have, but to check: have you installed the 64 bit version of the ELCollection.DLL? Do other indicators in the MC8 beta work correctly or does this behaviour occurs more often?
Completely silent, no error message at all everything else so far works perfect with the new beta. It looks like just redraw of the background when the data disappears, maybe triggered by an update in the chart like a tick etc.
(And yes I have installed the 64 bit version.) When i switch the status on and off it always reappears for a short but different amount of time.
I think i just found the answer myself. I had checked update on every tick. Once this was turned off the data stayed on the chart even though data was updated around it.
Hi,
Having a bit of an issue where not all of the events are being displayed.
I think this relates to my locale. I'm at GMT+10, so I have set the "myTimeZoneOffSet = 16;" allowing for DST.
In the download events file, I have the following -
1120308,1930,3,AUD,Trade Balance
1120308,2030,3,CNY,CPI y/y
1120308,2030,2,CNY,PPI y/y
1120309,0200,1,EUR,German Final CPI m/m
1120309,0200,1,EUR,German Trade Balance
The German events are being correctly displayed as happening this evening (9th March) @ 1800 hrs my time. This is as per ForexFactory.
However, the preceding events (AUD & CNY) are not being displayed at all.
Note the date stamp on these, prior day. But they are for today at (09 March 2012) @ 11:30AM and 12:30AM.
So I'm guesing that the TimeZoneOffSet is doing the time offset but not the date adjustment.
You're completely correct Neil - thanks for raising the issue here. I was able to replicate it here, so it's not related to your settings etc.
I've attached an updated EE.ReadFile function which adjusts the date (and not just the hours). The settings and other functions can be left untouched, only the ReadFile function needs to be replaced.
With the updated function, I get the following output when using TimeZoneOffSet of 16:
Where the notepad is in EST, and the events on the left on TimeZoneOffSet 16.
(Note that the remaining minutes calculation is wrong here, since my pc's local time is not on Australia time, so the first events have already passed but are still displayed here for that reason.)
Let me know if you run into other problems or the TimeZoneOffSet still gives you problems.
-----
Note: importing the attached EE.ReadFile function will overwrite the existing. For users that have modified the EE.ReadFile function, the following lines...
So v1 of EconomicEventsDownloader.jar is not able any more to retrieve the information from Forex Factory Web site.
Enclosed please find a new version (v2) of EconomicEventsDownloader.jar which solves this issue.
As for v1, the enclosed ZIP also contains source code. This source code is useless for the execution of EconomicEventsDownloader.jar. It is just given as a reference if, for any reason (for instance: security), you prefer to review the code and compile yourself the .jar file.
Thanks to @Jura for having spotted the problem in v1, and also having identified a problem (now solved) in beta version of v2. Remaining bugs, if any, are mine.
Nicolas
PS - Forex Factory also limited the historical information available. We cannot obtain economic events prior to 2009 (versus 2007 previously).