TradeStation Help

About ActivityBar Studies

ActivityBar studies are a powerful, innovative type of analysis techniques. ActivityBar studies provide you with look inside-a-bar technology, which enables you to display and analyze transactions that occurred within each bar on your chart. You have access to plot trade record, bid record, ask record, volume, splits and implied volatility overlaid on standard time-based price bars at any data interval. You define the time frame of the bar chart you create, and then, using an ActivityBar study, break that time frame into smaller increments, or "cells."

There are five built-in ActivityBar studies, each provides you with a different type of analysis. You can also create your own analysis technique using EasyLanguage in the TradeStation Development Environment. Just like other analysis techniques, ActivityBar studies are written using inputs, which means you can format the studies as you apply them to a chart and customize them to your liking.

You can also base indicators and trading strategies on an ActivityBar study, which provides you with an entire additional layer of data and analysis. For example, you can base a trading strategy on whether or not a certain amount of data fell within a specific "zone" on the price bar. For one simple example, you can see whether or not 50% or more of the prices were in the top third of the bar.

You can use ActivityBar studies to formulate trading strategies, in part or whole, on relationships that occur within a price bar and not just between the volume, open, high, low, and/or closing prices of the bars. This opens up a new and richer way of viewing your markets.

How ActivityBars Work

To illustrate how ActivityBar studies work, we'll use the Price Distribution ActivityBar study. This ActivityBar study enables you to create a 10-minute bar chart, for example, but also allows you to see the prices at which most of the trading occurred, overlaid directly on the 10-minute chart.

When you insert and format the ActivityBar study, you define the size of your ActivityBar cells by specifying the data interval to use. In this example using a 10-minute price chart, you can choose 1-minute, 2-minute, or 5-minute data interval. The 1-minute interval will give you ten cells (10 minutes divided by 1 minute equals 10 cells); the 2-minute interval will give you five cells (10 minutes divided by 2 minutes equals 5 cells); and the 5-minute interval will give you two cells (10 minutes divided by 5 minutes equals 2 cells). The idea is to choose a data interval for your ActivityBar study that is divisible into the interval of the underlying price chart (in this case, 10 minutes).

Let's say you insert the Price Distribution ActivityBar study in your 10-minute chart and set its data interval to 1-minute. Each 1-minute time unit will be displayed as a cell on one side of the 10-minute bar to reflect where the closing price fell during that period of time (by default, the cells will display to the right of the bar). Each additional cell is created consecutively, reflecting the position of the closing price during the next time unit, until enough cells are created to total the time frame of the bar. In this example, there will be a total of ten 1-minute cells for the 10-minute period.

The figure below illustrates how a typical ActivityBar is built. As you can see, the ActivityBar study enables you to pinpoint the most heavily traded price point within that bar (in this example, 58 to 59).

In the above example, we specified an ApproxNumRows of 3. ApproxNumRows is the input for all ActivityBar studies that allows you to specify approximately how many rows you want the study to build. In this case, since we specified three rows and the trading range is 57 to 60, all closing prices between 57 and 58 will be grouped together. You can specify more rows if you want to break down the data even further. You can change virtually all aspects of an ActivityBar study; for example, whether or not to display the cells, the individual colors of the cells, and more, depending on the individual study.

Each of the built-in ActivityBar studies provides a different type of analysis, and you can format these studies to display the way you want; however, the concept of how the ActivityBars are created is the same.

Due to their construction, ActivityBar studies may not be applied to tick or Point & Figure charts. Also, like a trading strategy, you can only apply one ActivityBar study to a chart at a time, and the ActivityBar study is always applied to Data1. You cannot specify the subgraph in which you want to display the ActivityBar study; the ActivityBar study is always applied in the subgraph along with Data1.

Also, to accommodate the cells, the open and closing prices are identified with larger arrows, which you can choose to display using the formatting options.

See ActivityBar Study Library for detailed descriptions and illustrations of each ActivityBar study.

About ActivityBar Studies

How ActivityBars Work

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