In real time, TradeStation studies can process data tick-by-tick as bars form. That way one can do things like determine the price at which there was the highest burst of trading volume or the price for which most trading occurred throughout the time of the bar.
Historically, intrabar details are more limited for TradeStation studies. The way to do it is with ActivityBar studies.
Other ways to look inside bars historically include:
- Intrabar order generation for Strategies (by default looks at bars in 4 steps)
- Look-inside-bar back-testing for Strategies, which can be set with resolution as fine as tick-by-tick (currently with volume keyword limitations and no more than 6-months of history).
- Add secondary data streams to a chart, to be the inside-bar data for the data stream of interest. Note that multi-data charts are not currently allowed to have a tick data stream. This is the same as with ActivityData which must be of timed-interval bars.
So far, Strategies can’t plot. Displaying information gathered by approaches 1 and 2 is more involved than with indicators. And all three of the alternative approaches require extra setup work from the end-user; so the above approaches should only be considered for special cases.
ActivityBar studies are the way to go. The one caveat is that ActivityBar EasyLanguage can be tricky.
Here are two example ActivityBar studies:
- HiVolbarInBar – Shows the highest volume (ActivityData) bar inside the visible Bar.
- HiVolOnBar – Uses ActivityData to estimate the price of highest trading volume within a Bar.
