Market Insights

TradeStation’s award-winning platform offers countless tools for staying on top of the market. Today we’ll consider “ShowMes” on intraday charts.

ShowMes are indicators telling you when something happens. They show events like new highs or certain candlestick types.

Some traders may find ShowMes useful on intraday charts because they can detect longer-term events that might not otherwise be visible.

For example, weekly highs and lows may be important as support and resistance levels. But they may be hard to see on charts with 15-minute or hourly candles. (The reason is that intraday charts only see short-term intervals and don’t recognize days and weeks. ShowMes have advanced functionality to overcome this limitation.)

The screenshot below shows Apple (AAPL) with hourly candles and the ShowMes “New High for the Week” and “New Low for the Week.” Lows are marked in blue and highs are marked in with orange.

Notice how AAPL often fell after hitting new highs and rose after hitting new lows. This may help active stock traders “buy the dip and sell the rip.”

Adding ShowMes to Charts

Customers can use ShowMes like these by opening any chart on the TradeStation desktop platform and following these steps:

• Click on the Studies button at the top, then click “Add Study.” A dialog box will appear.
• Click the “ShowMe” tab on the left.
• Scroll down to find New High for Week and New Low for Week. (You can hold down the Ctrl key to select multiple ShowMes.)
• Make sure the “Prompt for Editing Box” is checked. This will let you customize the study before it’s added.

Using the default settings, new highs will appear as orange circles and lows will be colored blue.

Traders looking to make changes may consider:

• Changing the type of marker under the Style tab. For example, the ShowMe could appear as a tick or a cross.
• The Style tab also controls the thickness (“Weight”) and Transparency.
• Changing the color with the Color tab. This may be useful if you want the ShowMe to contrast against your chart’s color scheme.

This is just one example of how ShowMes can potentially assist traders. Following similar steps can also highlight events like:

• Consecutive Bars Down. This may help traders spot pullbacks based on time (instead of level).
• OHLC Yesterday: Draws lines at the previous session’s Open, High, Low and Close. These sometimes become support or resistance.
• Outside Bar: See when a candle makes both a higher high and higher low than the previous candle. This can signal reversals.
• Inside Bar: See when a candle remains within the price action of the previous candle. This can signal consolidation.
• New High for Month or New Low for Month.