Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been conspicuously absent both in my posts here and in the forum of late. Well….I’ve been locked in the ThinkScripter laboratory for nearly eight weeks now working on the facelift for the blog and I’m happy to take the wraps off the new design today. This marks the third major site overhaul since I began in January of 2009.

The first iteration was a boilerplate WordPress.com blog with little or no customization. This is a great way to get started publishing content on the internet. Being the tinkerer that I am, I quickly began running into the limitations of the basic free blog. I moved over to a paid server and cobbled together a few custom theme parts to introduce version two. It served me steadfastly until my desire for just that much more control finally got me rolling a few months ago.

Many of the changes are under the hood, so to speak, and rather than add patches to the previous site architecture I just started with a clean slate and built my own theme. I’ve added a dynamic Indicator page, thinkScript syntax highlighting, and skinned the Forum properly just to name a few of the enhancements. In the process I became much more intimate with web architecture, php, css, wordpress, etc and finally feel like the master of my own domain – no pun intended.

As with all major updates I expect to encounter some bugs along the way and would appreciate any tippers if something is acting wonky.

Lastly, it has been a distinct pleasure and honor to bring this site to you and the thinkScript community at large. Thank you all for your kind remarks, encouragement, and donations along the way. Now, time for a cold one!

Your host,
Eric

Some of you may have noticed that my pace of development has slowed down in the last six months. This was as a result of some major transitions in my life which are now mostly complete. I hope to return with a renewed vigor in the coming weeks. I am tossing around several ideas for expanding the Pro Subscriber benefits to include a 24/7 Adobe Connect Pro chat room, a thinkScript educational video series, and of course some new studies taken from my now exceptionally long list of requests. Please let me know your thoughts/desires!

Best of luck to all and thank you for the donations and support,
Eric

1. Scriptable alerts – both the regular kind and audio alerts
2. Retrieve h/l/c data from a different aggregation period (i.e. Say I want to plot a 50 period moving average from a daily chart on my 5 minute intraday chart – Note that’s NOT the same as a 50×130=6500 period average on the 5 minute chart)
3. Change the paintbar color from thinkScript (I’m running out of combinations of dots, triangles, and squares!)
4. Label the study lines from thinkScript
5. Execute trades from thinkScript (oooo!)
6. Change strategy mode from thinkScript (e.g. from short_entry to long_exit)
7. Capture time and sales data
8. Vertical lines…please
9. Capture put/call ratio data
10. A way to directly plot lines on charts from thinkScript (e.g. plot(close[10], close) might draw a line from the close 10 bars ago to the current bar close)

1, 3, and 8 have been fully implemented. 2 is partially implemented as you still can’t grab data from another aggregation period except daily, weekly, and monthly on intraday charts. To do true multiple timeframe indicators, we need the ability to access other timeframe data directly. Furthermore, you should be able to place an indicator from another timeframe on your chart. For example, I would like to be able to put a 60 minute stochastic on my 5 minute chart. For number 4, I would like to be able to add a label on the far right margin for a horizontal plot line. I’m not sure where we stand with 5 as TOS seems to be focusing on Prodigio. Since the minimum trading requirements for Prodigio require you to be a mini-HFT (check out the minimum monthly contracts traded requirement!), I have no desire to use or code for it. 6 – Not sure what I was thinking here but I have all but abandoned strategies as a mostly worthless novelty item. TOS needs much more robust backtesting functionality here to regain my interest back. I believe 7 is in the works or at a minimum volume at the ask and offer (I’ve been told April/May timeframe). 9 – The data is there, why can’t we get the feed in thinkScript? And finally, for 10 I want to be able to draw lines directly from thinkScript without using the current continuous plot construct. Said another way, I want access to the TOS drawing tools from within thinkScript. We should be able to programmatically execute any of the drawing tools via thinkScript calls. As I stated before, a simple line might be executed via a command like plotLine(fromBarNumber, fromPrice, toBarNumber, toPrice, extend);

I will be formulating my new Top Ten List in the coming days and I’d love to hear what y’all think. Please post your thoughts in the comments below. – Eric