Hi,

I have a suggestion to enhance JForex to include time lines representing the opening times of the worlds major FX markets Tokyo, London and New York on the chart.

My trading day usually starts with drawing time markers on many charts to reflect the opening times of these major markets. The trouble with drawing time markers, apart from the time it takes each day, is I like to change their attributes, particularly the colour to a light grey so I can see the candle shadow. I also remove the arrows for the same reason and edit the label with the markets name. I also change London's time marker to a dashed line so its easy to spot (it's in the middle of the three) when several (days) time markers are present on the chart.

This idea could be extended where the canvas of the chart is greyed for a particular market with market overlaps highlighted in some way. The whole idea is to show when the markets open, close and overlap.

Why do I bother? Well, I like these because they help to remind me when the key players/currencies are active. I also draw time markers when major news items are due to be announced, again they remind me of an upcoming event. News Markers could be added to the toolbar with attributes to suit.

Hey! here's another idea, add another menu item on the context menu for each toolbar item called 'make default' this way every time marker in the future will look like my last customised version. Neat.

I would be interested to hear comments on this idea or time representation on a chart in general. Which remind's me, the facility to change the GMT time to local time would also be handy.

Regards

I like the idea to be able to configure (repeating) daily timemarkers!
This would help a lot.

As anyone could have different requirements what daily timemarkers to include in the charts,
how about implementing a "daily timemarker configuration" dialog similiar to the Fibonacci "edit levels" dialogs,
where we users can configure daily timelines ourselves and switch them on or off.
The dialog could hold the following properties to configure a timeline:
label, time (hh:mm:ss), linecolor, stroke, weight, active (checkbox to toggle between active/deactive)

The daily timemarkers would be shown in periods HOURLY and below.

To make it perfect, the active-property could be set locally for each instrument.
The dialog would show the "active"-property for the instrument of the active chart.
This way the timemarkers could be switched on/off per instrument, showing
for example a "Tokyo.Open" timemarker in USD/JPY, but not in USD/CHF, etc.

It would be great if you could consider such a functionality.
Best, RR.

This probably could be implemented as custom indicator ...
If make it as specific vertical lines will sown at the time of opening/closing markets .. what do you think ?

thanks for your reply.
Good idea.
Maybe something to include in the DK indicator-library to make it available for all users.
(it could be an indicator for just on time with the daily time and the line properties as parameters).

Best, RR.

I guess this could be implemented as another Technical Indicator, but it's not really an Indicator, well not a technical indicator we usually rely upon to help forecast price changes. So keeping this feature under the Indicators Toolbar button would not be intuitive.

I also like to keep my Indicators and other scribble from the Drawings Toolbar, to a minimum for ease of use. Trying to control Indicators or other drawing objects on the chart, that are close together, can be difficult because they all light up like a Christmas tree expecting to be chosen for new property values. So, implementing as an Indicator would only add to this issue.

I would prefer to see this feature displayed under the prices where it does not hide any of the price information. I see this as being an enhancement to the Grid currently displayed under the price information. The Grid properties could be controlled from a Tools menu item.

Currently the Grid appears to float under the price bars, zooming in/out just changes the size of the price bars with no change to the Grid, the Grid does not align to specific times - like every 10 minutes or align to the prices - like every 10 pips. It could do with some enhancement anyway.

I am glad this discussion is progressing, I just wanted to raise awareness and stimulate discussion, hopefully the Dukascopy IT team will see some benefits in the idea and other Traders will contribute their own ideas to improve my own.

Good Trading

Hi,
Just want to clarify about drawings which is close to each other: All chart objects also available in workspace tree, and can be controlled from there ... or I get something wrong ?

That's a good point, it's certainly is easier to select a drawing object using the tree.

The point I was really trying to make was the Market Opening Times as an Indicator would only add to the complexity on the chart and prevent the ease of use when selecting objects on the chart.

I'm thinking eventually the Market Opening Times feature would become automatic, changing for day light saving time and different opening times for each market (if they should change). You could offer this as the default, but allowing the user the opportunity to change the property value. I see this as a static indicator, once set you pretty much leave it alone.

RoadRunner had a good idea to make the Market Opening Times feature based around currency pairs more suitable for trading that market. Perhaps that idea could be provided through workspaces?

In other software I have used I create a workspace for a specific time zone, say london for GBP/USD, etc, Tokyo for GBP/JPY, etc, New York for EUR/USD, etc. This offers the ability to view a set of currency pairs together with the Market Opening Times feature under the price bars for further detailed guidance.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for your comments. We are studying your request now for possible further implementation.

This sort of feature would be far more useful if either the times were just made available through the API somehow, or a function that returns a boolean if a session opens. Personally I'd prefer to know how much time in the future a session will open (in ms or something), or 0 if the session is already open. If it were just an API call I'd be constantly polling (or wanting a way to set callbacks), but if it's implemented the way I just described I could just idle until that amount of time has passed.

-Brian