Use

Purpose

This energy function can be further processed to bring out the longer term cycles. This is done by passing the XGO energy data through a Zero Delay (ZD) filter. By selecting the appropriate length filter, long term forecasts can be made months and years in advance.

These are forecasts, not guarantees. It has been found that a market will tend to follow the XGO forecast, or its inverted forecast. On the long term forecasts, the market may have short term deviations from the forecast, but generally track the forecasts.

Using these forecasts in trading is like using a weather forecast. One must be alert for the forecast not being correct. One needs to look out the window before going on the picnic. Technical indicators should be used to confirm the forecasts, and stop loss orders should always be placed.

Computing an XGO Forecast

Start

and following the folder tree

Start -> Programs -> MicroMedia -> WinXGO -> Launch WinXGO.exe

Double clicking on WinXGO will run the program.

When it runs, you will see a dialog box like this:

WinXGO computes a data file in a humanly readable text (ASCII) format. Various trading programs can read text data in and overlay it on a price plot. To produce a basic (raw) XGO file, all one has to do is to enter the natal (first trade or birth) date , a date range for the output file, a format, and name the output file.

To get you started, the program is preloaded with the natal date for the S&P 500 (4/21/1982), and the specifies the date range to be 1/1/2003 to 1/1/2004. The output file is to be named sp.xgo, is to include all calendar days, and is to have a ChaosTrader output format. The output will not be delayed, and will be scaled by 10/10, or 1 , and not have a bias number added to it. Bias numbers are needed to make the output values positive, which is needed for some programs. The XGO values by nature are negative numbers. A minimum value and maximum value of the file are initially zero, since XGO has not been computed yet.

Click on the Compute XGO button. The S&P 500 XGO energy will be computed and place in the current folder, which, unless you changed it at installation, is c:/program files/micromedia/winxgo.

The program will compute the XGO file, and display this box.

Click on the OK button to acknowledge that WinXGO has done its job. It produced an XGO forecast file for you, using the XGO formula. Notice that the minimum value is now -48.46 .. and the maximum value is zero. These values show you the range of the data in the XGO file.

Now all you have to do is get that file into a trading program so you can see it.

This is easier said than done. How to do that varies with the trading program you are using. And to be able to work with XGO files, you will need to learn how to read the XGO file into your trading program. To aid you in learning this process, we have include a copy of the Chaos Trader EOD (end of day) program, and will show you how to load XGO files into it.

But before doing anything graphical with the XGO files, it is important that you understand how to look at them. They are text files, which can be read by any word processing program. They can also be read by the Notepad program that comes with all versions of Windows. It is the preferred tool for looking at XGO files.

You can open Notepad on your system by going to

Start -> Programs -> Accessories ->Notepad.

But WinXGO includes a version of Notepad. If you just click on the View XGO button, it will start Notepad, and have it open the XGO file you just computed-in this case, sp.xgo. Do that now.

You will see a window like this:

Each day has a single value, the energy given to the market or person by the universe for that day. Think of this as current flow into a battery. The value is negative because the universe is charging up the market. Representing the energy values this way gives the normal energy pattern. In this pattern, lows in the XGO are normally market or personal lows.

Now, suppose your trading program cannot accept negative numbers. All you do is to add a bias. The XGO calculation normally does not go under -200, so adding a bias of 200 will make the numbers all positive values. It does now matter what the value really is, because what you are interested in are the relative motions up and down.

So close the notepad window, and adjust the Bias * to add value to 200. You can use the spinner control beside the box to run this number up and down, or you can just type in the number. Once you have done this, recompute the XGO file, and view it again.

Now you find the minimum value 151.533084 and the maximum value 200. When you look at the file, all values are positive. Positive values look like prices, so all trading programs can read them.

Now look at the Output Days portion of the dialog box. ChaosTraderEOD uses calendar days. It works with astrocycles, which never take weekends or holidays. But you may need to create a file for a program that uses only week days or trading days. You do this by checking the appropriate circle.

But how does WinXGO know when the holidays are? You have to tell it. To do this, you need to maintain entries in a holidays.txt file. This, like the XGO files, are text files that can be read, changed, and written by Notepad. Again, to make this easy, WinXGO has a button to open Notepad, and read the holidays.txt file. Click on the Edit Holidays button. You will something like this:

These are the holiday dates for the US markets. You may need to change this file for your markets, and add new holiday dates as time goes on. Just add the changes to the file and save it.

To see how this works, make a change, save the holidays.txt file, close Notepad, and re-open it.

Now recompute the sp.xgo file using the Trading Days selection. Then view the file. It should look like this:

Note that New Year's Day 1/1/2003 and Martin Luther King's Day 1/20/2003 and all the weekends are missing from the data file. After seeing this, close the Notepad window.

Now look at the Output File Format portion of the dialog box. This set of selections lets you pick a file format that can be read by your trading program. Most popular trading programs as well as spreadsheets are supported. In addition, WinXGO can generate a custom format, meaning it can generate an output file readable by any trading program.

Some programs can accept data with decimals in them. Some cannot. On the dialog box, X indicates a decimal value of the XGO energy, like 191.302. The letter I indicates the integer (whole number) part of the XGO energy, like 191.

To see how this works, select the Ensign format, compute XGO, and view it. You should get something like this:

This is an example of a format that needs quotes around the date, and separates the month, day, and year with a dash. It also requires open, high, low, and close values. XGO can formulate these from the raw XGO data. Then Ensign wants a number for volume, and another for open interest. These mean nothing for a XGO file, so a 1 is supplied to satisfy the format.

So if you pick the appropriate format, you can generate an XGO file for almost any trading program. You may want to try the various formats to see what they each look like. One note: the CSV file format is Comma Separated Variables, a standardized file format. This format optionally has a first line, called a header, that tells the reading program what is in each column. WinXGO does not add such a header. However, it can easily be added by viewing the file in Notepad, adding the required header line ( determined by your trading program), and saving the file with the header line in it.

What do you do if your program needs some other format?

You use the custom format option. By entering a string of characters, you can specify exactly how the output file will appear. This looks frightening, but is actually very simple. If you know that one of the standard formats will work for you, you can skip ahead to the next section.

The XGO program has a default custom format string of

"%02ds!M%02ds!D%04d"s!Y%8.3f!X

This is really four format specifiers-one for the month, ending in !M ( print M), one for the day, ending in !D, one for the year, ending in !Y, and one for the XGO value, ending in !X. Ahead of each ! (print) character, is the format to use to print that item.

Quote marks are printed as is. So are commas, slashes, and dashes - the common date separators. Spaces are indicated by the letter s. The digits 0-9 are also "passed through" unless they are part of a numeric field specifier.

The start of a numeric value field is indicated by %. Numeric values are specified as having decimal places (floating point number), with a small letter f, or having just a whole number, by specifying the letter d.

Each field, or column, is specified with a width. Width is the number of characters used to print the value, including any decimal point. If the width number follows a 0, zeros will be inserted ahead of the number to fill out the width. In a decimal number, a . followed by a number specifies how many decimal places follow the decimal place. The decimal place takes up one space in the field.

So "%02ds!M means to print a ", then the month in a two character field, using leading zeros, followed by a space. And %02ds!D means print the day in 2 characters with leading zeros, followed by a space. Then %04d"s!Y prints the year in 4 digits, and adds a quote and a space. Finally, %8.3f!X prints out the XGO value in an 8 character field with 3 decimal places.

To see how this all works, select the custom format, compute XGO, and view it. You should see something like this:

That's great, but what about adding dummy volume, and faking the open interest? The answer is the !E, which just means to print an empty field. The only thing printed is the characters in the format specifier that "pass through"

For example, try the custom format (hint: copy and paste it into WinXGO)

"%02d-!M%02d-!D%02d",!Z%.3f!X,1,1,!E

It will produce output like this:

An integer (whole number) value for XGO is specified with a !I. Try this format:
"%02ds!M%02ds!D%04d"s!Y%7d!I

It produces

Rearranging the month, day, and year is no problem. Try
%04d/!Y%02d/!M%02ds!D%7d!I
It will give

Filling in leading zeros for a fixed width format is easy. Try
%04d/!Y%02d/!M%02d,!D%07d!I
It will give

And if you need a two digit year, use !Z rather than !Y. Try
%02d/!Z%02d/!M%02d,!D%07d!I

It will give

The custom format will let you make your XGO file readable by almost any program. Adding Chiron

The original XGO formulation used all the major planets. Since then, I have found that Chiron is important. So checking the Add Chiron box will add its influence into XGO. Leaving it unchecked will give the original XGO.

Zero Delay (ZD) Filter

The normal XGO file contains the short term energy swings in a market. It has been found that the longer term cycles in a market can be extracted from this "raw" XGO by using a Zero Delay (ZD) filter. This is a filter that works similar to a moving average, but does not have a delay, as a moving average does. It can be applied to XGO, and also to price. So one can make a forecast with a particular length of ZD filter, and track that cycle by applying the same ZD filter to price.

The challenge of course, is to select the right length for the ZD filter. There are many ways to do this, some beyond this tutorial. But even a value that is off 25% can give good trading results. So it is a very useful thing to do. Further, it has been found that once a cycle ( a ZD filter length ) has been found in a market, it persists.

One of the better ways to find an appropriate ZD filter length is to look at the interval in days between major highs and lows, and set a ZD filter to about 80% of the average time between the highs and lows. This will often give a pattern that very closely resembles the price pattern. This pattern may be shifted right or left, so the XGO software includes the ability to not only apply the ZD filter to XGO, but to shift the result by a given number of days.

The ZD filter extracts the energy of a cycle, with the average value being zero, and the output having both positive and negative numbers. For this reason, the XGO program includes the ability to add a positive bias to the output file if one needs to make the file have only positive numbers.

The XGO program does something a little clever when you check the ZD filter box. This selects the ZD filter function, which needs an XGO file as its input. So the XGO file is generated to a temporary file named zd_filter_input.xgo, which then is ZD filtered, delayed, and biased. The output is then written to the output file you have specified. So you may want to change how you name the output file so you can later tell that it was ZD filtered. As a practice, I change the extension of the file to .zgo, and put the ZD filter length in the file name, and indicate the delay with an m for minus or a p for plus. So an sp.xgo file filtered by 118 days and shifted +28 days, I would name sp118p28.zgo. Note of this is required or enforced by the XGO software, but a naming plan will help you keep your work organized. I call these filtered files ZGO files.

Now it is time to generate a ZD filtered XGO, or ZGO file. Set up your WinXGO program so it looks like this:

When you click on Compute XGO, you will get two messages, one saying the XGO file was computed, then one that says the ZD filtered file was computed. Note that the Min of the filtered file is about -11.70 and the max about +12.99.

When doing ZD filtering, you may want to adjust the scale of the XGO file before doing the filtering in order to give you numbers with a bigger range. This depends on what your trading program plots. Here, if it were to use only whole numbers, if would plot from -11 to +12 with steps of 1, which would give a rough plot. Increasing the XGO scale to 100 ( which is always divided by 10 ) would make the range -117 to +129 with steps of 1. This would give a smoother plot.

We will come back to plotting in a moment, using the included light weight version of ChaosTraderEOD. But before leaving the XGO program, there is one more thing to learn.

Job File

It is a lot of work to set up all the entry data to make a XGO calculation. Further, you will probably want to make several similar calculations, such as several different filtered XGOs for the same market. So it is nice to be able to save you entry values, and later load them. This is done with the Job Description file name entry, and Load, and Save buttons.

Change the name of your job file from spjob.txt to sp118p28zdjob.txt, and click on save. You will get a message telling you the job has been saved.

Then close the XGO program, and run it again (Start->Programs->MicroMedia->WinXGO->Launch WinXGO). This gets you the default job. Now use the Job Description Filename Browse button to locate your sp118p28zdjob.txt job file. Click on the name, and click on Open. This will put the full path name of the file in the Job Description Filename box. Then click on Load. All your values have been reloaded into the XGO program. You can now recompute XGO, make changes, resave the job, or rename and then resave the job to give a new job. Again, smart naming of your files will help you keep your work organized.

That is all there is to generating XGO and ZGO forecasts. Just set up the parameters, and Compute XGO. Of course, there is a lot more to using them for trading. Doing that requires that you be able to plot the forecasts.

Plotting with ChaosTraderEOD

Since different people will be using XGO with different trading programs, I cannot give instructions on how to load your XGO files into whatever trading program you might have. You need to consult the instructions for that program to learn how to do that. But to get you started, I have included a restricted version of my ChaosTrader EOD program with WinXGO.

ChaosTraderEOD (CTEOD) is a very complex program, and does not yet have any written instructions. It is, however, pretty easy to figure out how to use it just playing around with the menus. This tutorial will focus only on those parts of the program needed to plot a price curve, and overlay an XGO forecast on it.

CTEOD has a permission file associated with it. This file is used to enable various portions of the program for various classes of users. In this limited version, you fill find menu items that are greyed out ( not done yet) or items, that if you click, will tell you that you do not have that function enabled. But you do have all the capability you need to plot price and an XGO or ZGO forecast.

Start the CTEOD program by using the
Start->Programs->MicroMedia->WinXGO->Launch CT.exe path. This will bring up a window that looks like this:

CTEOD starts you out with a default job file. Just as with the XGO program, you can then modify this job file to do what you want, rename and save it. Each job is a chart. Multiple jobs can be loaded at once.

Close the default job by clicking on the X in its top right corner. Then load the spxgo.ct job by using the File menu. The path is File->Open->spxgo.ct->Open. This will give a plot like this:

This is a simple price plot for the S&P500. To see the entries that set it up, click on the Job menu. You will see another menu of several job tasks, like this:

The four tasks we will be concerned with are Plot Layout, Data Source, Main Plot, and Overlays. Click first on Plot Layout. This is what you should see:

This dialog lets you put a name under the chart and on the vertical axis. It lets you select a landscape (recommended) or portrait page orientation, and to maintain a fixed scaling aspect (recommended) , and use color, or turn it off to print or see only black and white. Further, the chart can be divided into up to 4 stacked charts-one main and 3 auxiliary. For this example. we just want one main chart.

Now click cancel to close this dialog without making any changes. Then click on Job->Data Source. This is what you should see:

This dialog selects your price file. The full path name here is C:\Program Files\MicroMedia\WinXGO\spnear1.can. You can see it by putting the mouse in the file name box, clicking, and then using the left and right arrow keys to scroll the text left an right.

The ... button to the right of the box is a file browse button. With it you can browse to any data file.

ChaosTrader EOD accepts 4 file input formats. All are simple text files. The OHLC format has fields of month day year(4 digits) open high low close. The fields are separated with spaces. It is currently not fully used in CTEOD. The most common format in use is the HLC format, which has fields of month day year(4 digits) whatever high low close. The field after the year is ignored. Originally if contained volume. The sample spnear1.can file is in that format.

A file in the CLO format has fields month day year(4 digits) value. This is a single valued data series, such as an XGO file or a file of closing prices.

A file in the PRN format has the format month/day/year_in_4 digits open high low close This format is widely provided by many data vendors, such as TC2000 and TBSP.com. It is also widely supported as an export format by many trading programs. Files downloaded from these data services or exported from a trading program can be used directly in CTEOD. With a bit of simple programming, any text data file can be converted to a text data file to be used in CTEOD.

The data can be plotted in a Plot Style as a single line ( CLO ) or as a Gann style high-low-close bar ( HLC ).

That selects the data input. To plot the data, you use the Main Plot dialog. Cancel the Data Source dialog and select the plotting dialog via Job->Main Plot. This will bring up:

The Date portion allows you to select a plot that runs from the current date plus or minus so many days , or covers a fixed range of dates. The Price Axis portion lets you scale and label the price axis. CTEOD does not do automatic scaling, because scaling is too importantly to be left to a computer. We always want to scale to a fixed scale, so as the date range and price range are set, a value called PPD is computed. PPD is Points per Day.

The Ticks and Labels areas let you control the intervals between time tick marks and their labels. A value of 0 means "none.". MoDay is the day of the month. A 5 here means every 5th day of the month, like 5,10,15,20,25, and 30.

All of the CTEOD dialog boxes have an Apply button. This allows you to make a value change, click the Apply button, and see the change on the plot before you close the dialog. That avoids having to re-open the dialog if you do not like your change. You might want to see how this works my changing the Ticks MoDay to 10, and then applying it. When you are done, click on OK.

CTEOD will redraw the chart any time you change a dialog box or resize the chart window. If you want to force a redraw of the chart, just do
Job->Plot Layout->OK.

Since you make no changes, the chart will be redrawn the same-but it will reread the data file, and any auxiliary files. This becomes important when you want to overlay an XGO file.

Overlaying an XGO file

To overlay an XGO file, one uses the Job->Overlays menu. Up to 3 overlays can be used. Select the
Job->Overlays->Overlay 2 dialog. It will pop up like this:

It selects the C:\Program Files\MicroMedia\WinXGO\sp3.xgo file. Again, placing a cursor in the file name box will let you scroll left and right to see the full path name.

If you check the Add overlay to plot box, and click the Apply button, CTEOD will plot sp3.xgo as a red line. The plot will look like this:

Note that the range of the plot can be adjusted, it can be shifted up and down, and the plot can easily be flipped top to bottom , or inverted, by checking the Invert box. Try this, and apply it. Playing with these setting can often give you a pretty good overlay of XGO on the price plot. To get more detail, set the date range to just 1/1/2003 to 1/1/2004 (Job->Main Plot). Play with the settings to get comfortable with overlaying an XGO file on price. When you are done, set the date range back to 1/1/2003 to 1/1/2005 and close the Overlay 2 box.

Now open the Overlay 1 box. It looks like this:

It plots the C:\Program Files\MicroMedia\WinXGO\sp118p28-1.zgo file. It is a saved version of the one you generated earlier. Check the Add overlay to plot box, and click the Apply button. You will now see the ZD filtered XGO file plotted in blue. It should look like this:

This plot gives a smoother longer term forecast. In this case, the forecast gives an idea of the market's behavior in 2004. The forecast is for a decline in January and February, running into March. This suggests a strategy of selling, with a plan to hold short into March.

Now turn off the short term XGO (Overlay 2), and learn to track a cycle. By working with the ZD filter and past prices, you can find a cycle that is running in a market. Then, by tracking that cycle, you can confirm the forecast ZGO turns.

Tracking a Cycle with a ZD Filter

To track a cycle with a ZD filter, one uses an Auxiliary chart. To learn how to do this, select
Job->Plot Layout. Check the Auxiliary Plot 1 box, and click on OK. You you will see a plot like this, with 20% of its vertical space now used to plot a ZD filter of price.

This subplot has 3 lines-the blue line is the ZD filtered price line. The red line is a statistical SELL band above it, and the green line is a statistical BUY line below it. It represents a simple cycle based trading system. A basic buy signal is generated when the blue line dips below the green line and then crosses above it. A basic sell signal is when the blue line gets above the red line, and drops below it. If the blue line does not cross the zero energy level, the trend will continue, and generate additional signals.

To see what is being displayed in the Aux 1 chart, select
Job->Aux. Plots -> Aux 1. You should see:

This dialog lets you select a ZD filter, a Polarized Fractal Efficiency function, call an external program to generate a data file and plot it, or plot an external data file. Here we are just using the ZD filter option. The others are beyond the scope of this tutorial.

The ZD Cycle is set to the length of the cycle we want to track. Here it has been set to the length of the ZD filter we used on our XGO forecast.

The Volatility number is the number of days used to "look back" to compute statistics. This number should always be 15% or more longer than the ZD cycle length. It determines how much the red SELL and green BUY lines move up and down. The longer it is, the "stiffer" they are.

The Std Dev number is the number of standard deviations ( times 10) the BUY and SELL lines are away from the average of the ZD filter. Normally, a number near 15, or 1.5 standard deviations, gives a good initial system.

The very bottom of the dialog gives the scaling for the sub-plot. Here the minimum is -120, the maximum is 120, and a step size of 120 is used. This gives just the dotted green zero line as a grid line in the Auxiliary plot. You can also name the plot. Try changing the name to ZD118 and applying it.

Using this dialog, once you have found a cycle and forecast it, you can track it and produce buy and sell signals.

The XGO program makes it easy to generate market forecasts. But there is work involved in getting set up to use them effectively. If you choose to use CTEOD for plotting your forecasts, you will need to provide it price data in a format it can use, either by getting data from a compatible data feed, or exporting it from another trading program. Also, I provide free "learning data" for a few markets on my website. The accuracy and availability of this data cannot be guaranteed. We are not a commercial data vendor. The purpose of this data is to support the students using my tools. You will find this data at http://moneytide.com/hans/datalink.asp. This data may be copied and pasted into files for use by CTEOD or any other program.

This copy and paste is tedious, so I have included a getdata.exe program which can be run by using the
Start->Programs->MicroMedia->WinXGO->Launch getdata.exe path. You can use it to download updated data each evening. You can alos use the Window Task Scheduler program to run this program automatically each day.

This program calls another program called getdata.bat. This is a Windows batch file which will download the available data into the c:\program files\MicroMedia\Winxgo directory. It is found at c:\program files\MicroMedia\Winxgo\getdata.bat. It looks like this:

tear http://moneytide.com/hans/spnearcan.asp /S >spnear.can
tear http://moneytide.com/hans/tbondhlc.asp /S >tbond.hlc
tear http://moneytide.com/hans/goldhlc.asp /S >gold.hlc
tear http://moneytide.com/hans/wheathlc.asp /S >wheat.hlc
tear http://moneytide.com/hans/nikkeiclo.asp /S >nikkei.clo

Each line calls the program tear.exe to get a webpage and save it to a file. The /S option strips of the HTML header and footer, so only the body of the page is saved. The file names are on the end of each line.

Also included are sample job description files for these data files. These jobs only plot the data, and do not have any associated XGO files. The purpose of these is to give you some data files for other markets, so you can practice using WinXGO and CTEOD. All of these job files have obvious names, like wheatjob.ct.

Your homework is to compute the XGO file for each of these markets (see natal dates below) and overlay them on the plots. Then compute ZD filtered ZGO files for each market and overly them. See if you can find a good ZD filter length. Good candidate values are 80% of the year, divided by 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, and 8. Also, past Cash In On Chaos newsletters show many examples of ZD filtered XGO's in use. The numbers given in these newsletters are actual ZD filter lengths. These newsletters may currently be found at http://moneytide.com/hans/newsletters.asp.

You are encouraged to find a commercial source for your data, and not rely on it being available on my website. Someday I will retire, and the site may not be available. If you continue to use CTEOD, I highly recommend getting data from TBSP.com, which is where my data comes from. They support data export to an ASCII (text) file, in what CTEOD recognizes as a .PRN format.

If you chose to use another trading program, you need to learn how to load the XGO forecast files into it. In that case, you can track the forecast with traditional technical indicators. This is a bit of work, but worth the effort. Once set up, XGO is a powerful trading technology.

Conclusion

There is a lot more to using XGO and ZGO forecasts. This tutorial has covered the mechanics of generating, plotting, and tracking XGO forecasts. From here it takes practice to become adept at generating a forecast, ZD filtering it, and plotting it. This simply takes time and practice. But the process is simple:

1. Select a market
2. Get its natal date
3. Generate and XGO file
4. (Optional) Generate one or more ZD filtered XGO files
5. Overlay those files on price plots
6. Track the forecasts using ZD filter of other technical indicators
7. Use the forecasts to guide your trading strategy.

During this process, it is very useful to have both WinXGO and CTEOD on the screen at once. This way you can compute a new XGO or ZGO file, and see it on the plot by doing
Job->Plot Layout->OK.

Remember that XGO and ZGO calculations are forecasts. While they are extremely useful, they are not perfect. You should confirm the forecasts with standard technical indicators or a tracking ZD filter. For example, if the forecast is calling for a high, make sure your technical indicators also show a high. Then be sure to use stops.

The value of forecasts is to give you an idea of when a good move might come. Used properly, and backed by proper research, these forecasts can greatly improve your trading odds.

Good Luck,
Al Larson

Natal Dates

To get natal dates for a stock or commodity, the best source is the exchange on which it is traded. Contact the exchange and ask for the date of first trade. Do not use company incorporation dates. They do not work.

Here is a short list of first trade dates for some US Commodities, Indexes and Stocks:

Oats - 1/21/1877
Cotton - 9/10/1870
Crude Oil - 3/30/1983
Heating Oil - 11/14/1978
General Electric - 5/27/1926
Wheat - 5/1/1884
Corn - 7/14/1888
Soybeans 10/5/1936
Soymeal - 8/29/1951
Soyoil - 7/17/1950
Orange Juice - 10/26/1966
Cocoa - 10/1/1925
Raw Sugar - 9/28/1970
Feeder Cattle - 11/30/1971
Live Cattle - 11/30/1964
Live Hogs - 2/28/1966
Pork Bellies - 9/18/1961
Lumber - 10/1/1969
Tbonds - 8/22/1977
Tbills - 1/6/1976
S&P500 - 4/21/1982
Copper - 7/5/1933
Gold - 12/31/1974 (GC12.XGO)
Silver - 6/15/1931
Heating Oil - 11/14/1978 - Heating Oil #2
Unleaded Gas - 12/3/1984
Sugar #11 - 12/16/1914
Coffee - 3/7/1882
Currencies - 5/16/1972 - Canadian Dollar/Swiss Franc

Dow - 5/26/1886
Nikkei 6 28 1949
FT30/FT100-7/1/1935
NASDAQ - 10/25/1985
NASDAQ futures - 4/10/96
Australian All Ordinaries - AOI - 1/2/1980

IBM - 2/14/1924
Verizon - VZ - 7/3/2000
Corin Group-5/9/2002
Minn.Mining&Mgmt(MMM)3M-1/14/1966
AOL - America On Line - 3/19/1992
MSFT - Microsoft - 3/13/1986
Yahoo - 4/12/1996
Amazon.com - 5/15/1997
IOMEGA - 7/7/1983
Caterpillar - 12/2/1929
Dell Computers - 6/22/1988
Unisys - 5/31/1984
Pressteck,Inc. - 3/28/1989
Zoltek Companies, Inc. - 11/6/1992
Sunshine Mining & Refining WTS - 5/23/1996

Trade Station Procedure

I do not have TradeStation, but here are directions a friend of mine gave a client for loading MoonTide data into Trade Station. The only difference with XGO data is that there is no hour or minute field.
********************************
Hi Chris,

Al forwarded your message to me about getting the MoonTides into
TradeStation. The format you selected is correct - you just have to load the
data up as a 3rd party ASCII file. Do it like this:

1) Set up your chart
2) Insert - Symbol
3) Select "3rd party directory" at the top
4) Navigate to the folder with the MoonTides. You may have to set this up
the first time by clicking "New Dir...". Remember that you're looking for
ASCII data.
5) Select the file you wish to plot
6) Choose the second field order "Date Time O H L C V OI", with a date
format of "Year Month Day"
7) Make sure the starting and ending times are right.
8) Set the dates and time compression, then click OK.

That should do it. The data will appear in a subgraph on the bottom like an
indicator. If you want to overlay this like Al does on his webpage, you'll
need to write a simple indicator like:

plot1(c of data2,"");

Verify that, and set the scaling to screen, but in subgraph 1. An inverted
Moontide would just be -1*c of data2. You can hide the second subgraph by
going Format-Symbol-Data 2-Properties-Subgraph-Hidden.

Hope that solves your problem.

Erik (Erik Been of Wave59.com fame)

Back to main WinXGO page