Really
Long Term Charts
by Howard Arrington
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. |