Taking this daily scan code and trying to capture it on the 4 hour chart.

tempestlight

Hi there,

I'm trying to find this sort of scenario in 4 hour charts:

and [Open > Daily lower BB(20,2.0) *.98]
and [Open < Daily lower BB(20,2.0) *1.02]
and [close < Daily lower BB(20,2.0) *.98]

Now when I plug this into stockchart scans i can see this on the daily and then when i pull up the 4 hour chart it shows something similar. But let's say a stock drops from the upper bollinger band to the SMA 200, the 4 hour chart could be in the scenario code above, but this daily scan won't pick it up. So i'm just wondering if anyone has a little work around to this that i can't think of that would help capture more of these on the 4 hour chart. Thanks!

markd

It's not too surprising that 4 hour and daily patterns might be occasionally overlap, since the 4 hour interval is about two thirds the daily interval (6 1/2 hours on the US exchanges, excluding after hours). But, it's also not surprising that the daily scan would miss 4 hour patterns because the 4 hour patterns would appear and then disappear just a little faster.

If you want to pick up more 4 hour patterns with a daily scan (you can't scan on intraday data, although that might be coming), you could try modifying the daily scan parameters - maybe some number where the 4 and 6.5 (1 day) are both divisors (in other words, multiply the daily parameter by 6.5 and divide the result by 4 and look for a 0 remainder).

I'm just guessing at this, and it might not work any better.

tempestlight

https://scan.stockcharts.com/discussion/comment/6908#Comment_6908

Thank you for this! I think it may be a little too complicated for me to try this method and see good results. Do you happen to know any other scanning websites that offer the ability to scan the 4 hour chart?

markd

No, I just have Stockcharts. ThinkorSwim (TOS) has it, but you have to have an account with TDAmeritrade (soon to be part of Schwab). Schwab and Fidelity probably have intraday scanning on their platforms, too, although I don't know that for certain. I can say scanning on TOS is more complicated than Stockcharts (for me) - but not too bad if you have at least some programming experience. Also there are some more expensive options - Metastock and TC2000 (I think thats the name of it) - but they also require programming experience for custom scans.

lmkwin

In Arthur Hill's videos he often mentions using some guy who uses Amibroker to backtest his "strategy" discussions. I don't have any experience with them but looks like they support many options.

"All possible intervals / time compressions supported

Yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily charts, Intraday charts, N-minute charts, N-second charts (Pro version), N-tick charts (Pro version), N-range bars, N-volume bars"

https://www.amibroker.com/features.html

markd

Looking over the Amibroker link, it's a pretty sophisticated site - I would guess by looking at the support area questions there's a pretty steep learning curve.

lmkwin

Yes, it sounds like Amibroker has a steep learning curve and being C programming literate would be greatly beneficial. That is why, I believe, Arthur Hill uses the Alvarez service to provide his backtesting.

https://alvarezquanttrading.com/blog/welcome/

The Amibroker software was developed a couple decades ago when program customization required programmers.

Some of the "sample code" makes that clear for sure.

https://alvarezquanttrading.com/amibroker-sample-code/

markd

I remember that.

I also noticed you can download Amibroker to every version of Windows from 2K on. That's pretty solid programming.