The “Show Me” feature helps visualize how configuration settings interact

Last week, we had an interesting inquiry from a Scottrade customer. He seemed to be having issues with one of his strategies where there were no symbols coming through. He mentioned that he had been using this strategy for quite some time and until last week, he never experienced any problems. After we took a look ourselves, we soon figured out what exactly what caused the confusion.

Looking at his strategy, we only were able to detect three symbols. We also viewed the relative volume filter because that particular filter can drastically change results. Since this was a slow trading day prior to a holiday weekend, we concluded that there were just not a lot of active stocks.

Then we clicked on the “show me” button next to the relative volume filter to display the histogram. Once we saw the histogram, we knew instantly that it was a slow day and very few stocks were trading at 1 1/2 times their normal volume.

The way the histogram works is it starts looking at the market in general. What we did was we changed it to see the  client’s visible exchanges. Since changing the exchanges did not dramatically alter the results, we can conclude that the exchanges were not the problem.

Next, we changed the histogram again to see all of his filters. The histogram shows what the relative volume looks like compared to the rest of his filters. Instantly, it is clear that no stocks will match these filters and that the stocks the user wants to watch are trading on a low volume today.

In the end, the “Show Me” feature helped to confirm that there was no issue with his strategy after all. The problem was that it was indeed just a slow trading day. To verify this, the customer can use the Show Me feature and just drag the track bar inside of the histogram to see the various options. He could also keep his original filter settings. Hopefully, this information will instill some extra confidence in our software and let our customers know that everything is working properly.

Link to Histogram Videos on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/user/TradeIdeas/search?query=histogram

More questions? Contact Marissa Goodbody at info@trade-ideas.com