An Introduction to Programming in AmiBroker

In June we will be conducting two in-depth courses on how to program in AmiBroker .

These programming courses will be led by Matt Radtke, Director of Research at Connors Research. Matt is an expert AmiBroker programmer, and has a wealth of experience creating AmiBroker scans and backtests to simulate a wide variety of trading systems.

This is your opportunity to learn AmiBroker directly from a professional who oversees a team of AmiBroker developers and researchers. And it’s an opportunity for you to take your trading ideas, program them, see their test results and get their signals every day.  

For details on the Introductory AmiBroker Programming Course, please click here.

For details on the Advanced AmiBroker Programming Course, please click here.

Matt has written a three part series in order for you to understand the very basics of AmiBroker. Here is Part One

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AmiBroker is a powerful technical analysis program, with advanced charting, back-testing and scanning capabilities. Utilized by traders around the world, it’s the primary tool used by the Connors Research team to develop and test our strategies. Most importantly, it just might be the solution that will help make you a better, more profitable trader by giving you the power to validate your own strategies and find your own trade setups.

If you’re relatively new to AmiBroker, you might still be trying to get your arms around all the functionality that it provides. In this article we will describe how to add ConnorsRSI as an AmiBroker custom indicator so that it can be plotted on charts. Being able to do this will help you better understand the relationship between price changes and the value of ConnorsRSI. If you’re not familiar with ConnorsRSI, you can find more information here:

http://analytics.tradingmarkets.com/ConnorsRSI/.

The first thing you need to do after installing the AmiBroker application software is set up a data source. If you haven’t already done this, go to the AmiBroker Help menu and select “Help Contents”. Open the AmiBroker User’s Guide, and under that, the Tutorial chapter. Read through the “Updating Quotes” section to connect to the data source of your choice.

Now that you have a fully operational version of AmiBroker, we can add ConnorsRSI as a custom indicator.

From the Analysis menu, select “Formula Editor”; this will cause a blank editor window to appear. Next, click here to download the ConnorsRSI code. Open the file and copy and paste the text into the editor window.

From the File menu in the editor window, select “Save As”. The directory should default to the /Formulas/Custom folder in your AmiBroker installation directory. For the file name, enter “ConnorsRSI”. After you’ve saved the file, you can exit the Formula Editor.

Now we’re ready to add ConnorsRSI to a chart. Go to an existing chart window, or open a new one. In the left pane, you will see a number tabs including “Symbols”, “Charts”, and “Layouts”. Click on the Charts pane, and scroll down until you see “Custom”. Under the Custom folder, you should see “ConnorsRSI”.

Double-clicking the ConnorsRSI item in the list will add a new ConnorsRSI pane below your existing chart. It will also automatically open the Properties dialog for ConnorsRSI, which allows you to change the default input parameters for the Price RSI (3), Streak RSI (2) and Rank Period (100), as well as selecting the color to use for plotting ConnorsRSI. For now, pick a new color but do not change the other parameters. Click OK in the Properties dialog when you’re finished making your selections.

You should now see a chart similar to the one below:

You can add other indicators by double-clicking them in the left pane “Charts” tab, or by dragging and dropping them into the chart pane in which you want them to appear. For example, if you wanted to see how RSI(2) compares to ConnorsRSI, you could drag the RSI item from the “Indicators” folder and drop it in the ConnorsRSI pane. Change the Periods parameter to 2, select a color, and click OK. Now your chart would look something like this

 

Now that you know how to create and customize charts in AmiBroker, you’re ready to take the next step.

For details on the Introductory AmiBroker Programming Course, please click here.

For details on the Advanced AmiBroker Programming Course, please click here.