Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Questions about MultiCharts and user contributed studies.
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ABC
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Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby ABC » 03 Jan 2013

Dear Multicharts Team,

the Real-Time Market Scanner is a powerful feature within MC and in my opinion with only a couple of cosmetic changes this beast could really be unleashed.
With this in mind I created this topic, so other Scanner users might chime in with their suggestions for improvements.

Comparing TS’s Radarscreen to Multicharts’s Scanner, I am seeing a couple of things that can vastly improve the Scanner, with probably only minor changes. Having gotten feedback from several clients that stick to Radarscreen just because it allows to better setup and present the results, I am convinced that Multicharts could be better here.
Let me give you a real world example: It’s not uncommon to have several plots in a Scanner indicator, but not all the plots display a price value.

I am using this simple demo code:

Code: Select all

Plot1(Close, "Price");

Plot2(.77, "Percentage");

Plot3(Date, "Date");

Plot4(-1000, "Currency");

Plot5(Time, "Time");

Plot6("Hello World", "Text");

Plot7(7.25, "Fraction");
When you add a new study to the Radarscreen, it's very convenient to change the location via the “Move Up” or “Move Down” buttoms:

Image

The individual plots can all be setup differently, so you can conveniently present dates, time etc within one indicator. The display categories even have sub-categories to fine tune the outcome:

Image

Decimal Spaces can be set for every plot individually and not for all plots the same and you can also setup individual text aligning for each cell:

Image

Cell colors can be setup for the fore- and background for each cell individually:

Image

This is how it can look in the Radarscreen:

Image
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ABC
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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby ABC » 03 Jan 2013

This is how it looks like in the Scanner and I can’t even change the plot colors directly in the Scanner, I almost have to guess which plot is an actual value, which is a date or time for example:

Image

The only properties I can change do effect all plots.

Image

Finally a look at the Format window gives some more ideas for improvements and while the format is probably overloaded with features, some like sending the values of choice every X minutes via mail would be very convenient:

Image

To sum things up, the scanner is a very useful tool already, but it could be so much better and the fact that people are reluctant to switch to MC only because they don't like the Scanner compared to the Radarscreen should be more than enough incentive already to improve it.

Thank you and a Happy New Year to all of you,

ABC
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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby momentum » 03 Jan 2013

I'm a Scanner user but still have TS as the Scanner's displays are not too user friendly. I think that ABC's ideas are great and exactly what is needed. Expanding the Scanner's functionality will enable me to get rid of TS.

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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby TO_Trader » 03 Jan 2013

There are great ideas, and their implementation will greatly improve the scanner. I hope MC listens to these excellent suggestions.

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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby Dave Masalov » 09 Jan 2013

ABC,

Thank you for your suggestions. They have been forwarded to the developers and will be considered for future implementation. As for time, date, percent and currency formats recognition, it will be implemented in one of the next versions.

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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby JoshM » 23 Jan 2013

This is how it looks like in the Scanner and I can’t even change the plot colors directly in the Scanner, I almost have to guess which plot is an actual value, which is a date or time for example:

Image

The only properties I can change do effect all plots.

Image
I agree with your observations and helpful suggestions for further improvement.

You're probably already aware of the following ABC, but for users that aren't: if you convert the values of each column to a string, each value can be defined exactly independently of the other columns (e.g., the date format for the Date column, time format for Time column, and prices with the correct number of decimals).

It does take more coding work, instead of mouse-clicking work in TS, but might be a viable workaround for some.

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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby FB2013 » 16 Apr 2013

Another simple thing which i find a little bit annoying :
When i carlessly have clicked into the symbol row of the scanner during trying to use magnifying shortcuts on the linked chart. It happens that the symbol is overwriten with +++.

Therefore it would be great to lock the symbols, to prevent them by carelessly overwritten, during chart action.

Best regards

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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby Henry MultiСharts » 17 Apr 2013

Another simple thing which i find a little bit annoying :
When i carlessly have clicked into the symbol row of the scanner during trying to use magnifying shortcuts on the linked chart. It happens that the symbol is overwriten with +++.

Therefore it would be great to lock the symbols, to prevent them by carelessly overwritten, during chart action.

Best regards
Thank you for your suggestion. We are going to add "Lock button" to the scanner window in one of the future versions of MultiCharts (approx. ver 9).

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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby FB2013 » 09 May 2013

I use the scanner to see which stocks are in a mode
my system could be used. If they show a good mode it would be
great to enable a auto trading strategy within the scanner.
This would make the scanner a ultimative tool for portfolio level automated trading
with discretionary input.

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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby Dave Masalov » 10 May 2013

I use the scanner to see which stocks are in a mode
my system could be used. If they show a good mode it would be
great to enable a auto trading strategy within the scanner.
This would make the scanner a ultimative tool for portfolio level automated trading
with discretionary input.
Hello FB2013,

We plan to introduce portfolio trading functionality in Multicharts 9.0. You will be able to run a portfolio strategy which will scan your entire protfolio for conditions.

Auto-trading from scaner is already possible in MC .NET using unmanaged orders. See the following link for details: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=10720&sid=81d84aea ... 019#p66019

In regular MultiCharts you can link your scanner to the chart with your strategy applied and once you see that a certain instrument shows good performance just click on it in the scanner. Your chart will switch to this instrument and you will be able to enable auto trading on it. You can then unlink the chart from the scanner and create a new linked chart in case you want to start auto trading on another instrument.

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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby FB2013 » 11 May 2013

Sorry but that link brings me to the wrong thread.
I think you meant that one, right?
http://www.multicharts.com/discussion/v ... =unmanaged

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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby Dave Masalov » 13 May 2013

FB2013,

Correct. I apologize for the confusion.

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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby FB2013 » 13 May 2013

This autotrading by the workaround looks at first nice.
But I think a simple button which can be pressed within the scanner would enhance
the use of that in a great way.
A similar feature like the ChartToolbar Trading functionality integrated within the scanner would be
a vast improvement.

The other thing i would like to have in the scanner is just the possibility to filter for different criteria in a list of stocks and that applied in realtime. A way of auto grouping a list of stock lets say 500 symbols and auto group them for certain criteria, which would result in an shrinked list to be monitored by myself within the realtime scanner.

For example i would like to see all the symbols, which made a reversal bar the previos bar.
And those get grouped into a new group the other symbols can stay in the maybe general group.
This would be a nice improvement for stock day traders.

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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby napalm » 13 Dec 2013

http://screencast.com/t/y1J3L4mW85

can scanner be improved so that it can be set up as shown. I created the above in NT to show me the trends on multiple timeframes .All i did was use MACD to give me the signals for price above or below a moving average to indicate up or down trend. It would be good if the facility to do something like this existed in market scanner

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Re: Ideas for vastly improving the Real-Time Market Scanner

Postby Dave Masalov » 13 Dec 2013

http://screencast.com/t/y1J3L4mW85

can scanner be improved so that it can be set up as shown. I created the above in NT to show me the trends on multiple timeframes .All i did was use MACD to give me the signals for price above or below a moving average to indicate up or down trend. It would be good if the facility to do something like this existed in market scanner
Thank you for your suggestion. All feature requests are forwarded to the management of the company and are evaluated in a timely manner. Please note that even though we value your opinion not all requests can be implemented due to the fact that some features do not fit into our current roadmap.


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