You can now use Chart Logic to create dashboards of any data defined in a strategy. Want to monitor some values across multiple pairs from the same chart? Now you can do this with ease.
The Dashboard feature will be available shortly in Chart Logic version 1.5.
Dashboards vs. Indicators
An "indicator" is intended to show information on a chart about that chart's symbol. In Chart Logic, when you use an Object Action to put some object on a chart (lines, text, rects, etc.) that information is specific to that symbol. More generally, I tend to refer to CL strategies that include Trade Actions as "Strategies" and those that only display information, without any trading, as "Indicators."
By design, one CL thread cannot see information about another CL thread, including their variables. If you're testing for an RSI high value as part of an entry condition, you don't want the EURUSD RSI value to affect your USDJPY trade. Threads are completely sandboxed from each other. But that made it impossible to create a strategy/indicator that would display information from multiple threads in a single view.
There is one place, though, where CL can display information about any thread, and that's in the Strategy Viewer. When a Strategy is active and you open the Strategy Viewer, and if the current chart is included in the strategy’s symbols, then by default the Strategy Viewer is showing the data for the current chart’s symbol. This happens automatically, you may not even have noticed it:
That highlighted cell is a pick list, and you can choose from here any available thread to display:
You don’t need to be on, say, USDJPY to see the values for USDJPY, you can select it from the list and that’s the data that will be displayed in the Strategy Viewer.
But if I’m interested in monitoring RSI data, this is kind of tedious. You don’t want to have to click down the list of threads in the Strategy Viewer to display the values. And in a complex strategy it can be hard to focus on the specific bit of data you want to track.
However, the key insight here is that the Strategy Viewer can view information from multiple threads, it just displays them one thread at a time. A Dashboard, on the other hand, would let you view multiple symbols at the same time and monitor the data from a single place. Here, for example, is one of my older dashboards, a standalone RSI dashboard (not Chart Logic):
This makes it easy to see in a single view what’s going on across pairs, and the cell highlighting draws your attention to some extremes that you might want to respond to.
The problem is that you are limited to only the information that I chose to add to this indicator. If you wanted to see something else in a dashboard view like this, you’d have to see if someone has written an indicator to display it, or write something yourself. But this really seems like the kind of thing that CL would excel at, doesn’t it?
Dashboard Strategy
Here’s the idea. In a CL strategy, you define variables that hold some data of interest. You can also define variables that hold color values based on some conditions. Every cell that is displayed has a foreground color and a background color. In the image above, the value for USDJPY in the “H1 60/40” column is being displayed with a black foreground color and a white background color, because its RSI value is inside the 60/40 high/low range. But USDCAD is shown with a white foreground color and a red background color, because it’s > 60. These are simple conditions for CL.
So, define your variables and colors. Check. Here is a simple example for one RSI value. I’ve defined some options for RSI high/low values so they can be easily adjusted, and then I get the H1 RSI(21) value, which I set to a variable. I then set variables for colors, and I do some tests for extremes. Note how the color tests are nested inside of an OR set, so it will get default colors for just being above or below 50, but if it’s above or below the RSI high/low value then it gets different colors set, for the cell highlighting.
In the first row at the top of the Strategy Viewer, there is now a “D” in that first cell. We are currently in “Viewer” mode, and you can click the “D” to switch to “Dashboard” mode:
Now you see the title bar says “Dashboard”, and the first cell of the first row has a “V” in it, which you can click to toggle back to the "Viewer" mode. Initially there is nothing displayed here. There are no symbols shown because the strategy is not active; and there are no columns shown because we have not configured our Dashboard yet. Click the “Configure” button to bring up the Column dialog:
What you are doing in the Column dialog is defining the columns that you want to display in the dashboard, by selecting from the variables that are set in the strategy. In the header row for the “Variables” section, click the little pencil icon on the far-right side to expand the list of all available variables:
The name for variables is showing you both the scope and the name. Recall, scope can be “Global” or “Local”; when scope is local, that means it is limited in visibility to the Logic Set where it is defined, so here we show the name of the Logic Set. For the Dashboard this is more for your convenience, so if you have the same variable name defined in multiple Logic Sets you can unambiguously select the correct one.
When you click one of these variables, it adds it as a row in the dialog:
Initially the colors used to display this data come from the inputs for the EA, selecting the normal cell foreground and background colors. You can click these names and edit them, if you want to used a fixed color for the cell foreground or background. Unlike in other places in CL where you select colors there is no color picker here; you can type either a color name or an RGB value as a string (“0,0,0”). But typically we would be selecting variables that are setting colors fromt the strategy based on various conditions, as we saw above. Click the “(p)” next to each color to select from the available color variables. Here we limit the variables to those that are of the “color” datatype:
Select the color to set it in the table:
Now, whatever the strategy says the FG color should be, it will be set in the dashboard. Let’s do the same for the background color:
If you’ve decided that you don’t want this variable displayed in the dashboard, click the “x” in the “Remove” column to remove it. If there are multiple variables in this dialog then you can also adjust the order of the variables without having to remove and re-add them in the correct order. Simply click the variable name in the table (the row will be highlighted to show that it is selected) and use the arrow keys on the keypad to move the row up and down in the list. This is similar to how we reorder Logic Sets in the Strategy dialog, and Conditions in the Logic Set and Set Condition dialogs.
Just for illustration purposes, as I wouldn’t really want to display the high/low values in the dashboard, I’ve added these variables to the list. I clicked “RSI” in the "Variable" column of the first row, and the row became selected:
And now if I hit the up or down arrows on my keyboard’s number pad, it will move this row up and down the list. If it’s the first row and I press UP it moves to the bottom; if it’s the last row and I press DOWN then it moves to the top. Otherwise it just steps up and down as expected. The order of the rows in this table determines the order of the columns displayed in the dashboard.
Okay, let’s go back to just the RSI variable, and click “Close” here to return to the Dashboard:
Now you can see there are two columns defined in the lower section: Symbol and RSI. Symbol will come from the Threads when the strategy is running; and RSI is the column that we configured above. There is no data showing yet because the strategy is not active. Let’s activate it now:
I’ve clicked to the left of the strategy “RSI Dashboard” to activate it, and you can see that this is active for 28 pairs, the number shown in brackets to the right of the strategy name. As usual we can bring up the Strategy Viewer by clicking the name of the strategy in this list. Because the strategy is running, and because we have configured columns to display in a dashboard, the Dashboard view comes up by default:
Sorting
Columns support sorting. Click the column header to select which column to sort by, and click again to change the direction. Initially everything is sorted by the Symbol column in ascending order (i.e., alphabetical order). The data is updated based on the Cycle of the condition that is setting the variable.
Want more RSI columns for different values? Want different colors? Want to display values normalized to an EMA, or along with some other data like MACD? That’s the whole point, you can build and display what YOU want.
Swap Dash
Let’s look at another example. Let’s say I wanted to create a dashboard to refer to the long and short swap costs for all pairs in a single display. I can define a strategy to access the long and short swap costs, and set variables for colors based on the value. And if the value is below some amount, say < -5.00, I can highlight the cell in red.
I need a variable to hold the long swap cost, and its foreground and background colors based on its value. And another variable for the short swap cost, and its colors. As strategies go this is pretty straightforward.
Here is a strategy that defines this model:
I have only expanded one of the SetConditions setting the colors to make it easier to read, but you get the idea. Here is how the Dashboard view is configured:
And when I run the strategy and open the Dashboard:
Conclusion
Now you can make dashboards of literally any data that you can describe with a CL condition, and format it to display based on your own parameters. Want to see the values of all open trades for each pair? Want to view values from an indicator? Key levels, high/lows, ADR values, distances from support/resistance areas? Literally anything you can imagine, describe in a condition and save in a variable, can now be used to create dashboards.
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