Chart Displays
One CQG feature very important to me is the chart displays. CQG provides fourteen different styles of charting: Bar, Line, Spread bar, Candlestick, Constant Volume Bar, Equalize Sessions, Fill Gap, Market Profile, No Gap, Percent bar, Point-&-figure, Tick TradeFlow™, and Yield bars.
In addition, you can overlay different markets and studies on the same chart using the Analog study. This range of choices gives traders a great deal of flexibility when setting up pages to track markets.
I wanted to show one example from one of my pages. I am leaving out other elements I would have on the page, such as quote displays and the Order Ticker, just to focus here on charts.
The top two charts are 5-minute Analog charts. The left top chart is the NASDAQ 100 index (left hand scale) and the NASDAQ volume ratio (up-volume/(up-volume + down-volume)) using the right hand scale. The right top chart is the S&P 500 index and the NYSE volume ratio (up-volume/(up-volume + down-volume)) using the right hand scale.
I track the volume ratios to identify the flow of buying and selling in the equity markets. Volume ratios above 50-percent indicate more up-volume then down-volume of equity trades on the exchange, a sign of buying pressure.
Volume ratios under 50-percent indicate more down-volume than up-volume, a sign of selling pressure in equities.
Notice that the NASDAQ volume ratio peaked and started stair stepping lower ahead of the S&P 500. In this case, when technology started heading lower, the S&P 500 went with it.
The bottom two charts are aggregated TradeFlow charts of the E-mini NASDAQ 100 and the E-mini S&P 500, respectively.
With CQG, you can create customs studies. I created two studies to use with TradeFlow. The TFCross study plots two lines. First, is a 5-bar running sum of trades at the ask price (the green line and represents buying by traders) and trades the bid price (the red line and represents selling by traders). The TFUmTFD study (TradeFlow Up minus TradeFlow Down) is simply the difference between the two lines plotted in the TFCross study.
In the E-mini NASDAQ 100 TradeFlow chart, we can see that traders were consistently hitting bids (the red line of the TFCross was dominating the green line). In other words, sellers were the aggressors, and were able to attract a following. The e-mini S&P 500 ultimately headed lower, as well.
These two TradeFlow custom studies are available here at the CQG Web site. In addition, more articles on TradeFlow are posted there.
TradeFlow charting tells us whether the last trade was a trader hitting a bid or lifting the offered price. That is key information, as now we know who the aggressors are: the buyers or the sellers.
I have been using CQG since about 1984. The choice of charting displays is one of my favorite features. This example is just two of the chart styles I use.