The MarketDelta Blog

Special Note: the functionality I describe in this article requires the Pro version or higher of MarketDelta.

Here is the chart I employ for my larger time-frame analysis. I often vacillate between including overnight data in my analysis or not. Recently, say over the last couple years, it’s clear that overnight activity is often as important as the regular trading hours. On the other hand, while I want to see this overnight data, I want to be able to clearly delineate between overnight and regular hours.

Well, one way to do that is simply flip between session overrides. That’s fine, but in my estimation, something is lost when you do that. I want to see all the data, but yet at a glance separate it. Well, here’s an easy way to do it.

I first created a signal formula which would return a true value for any bar before 8:30 or after 15:15 (my local time). Here is the formula: (TIME < = 0830) OR (TIME > 1515)

Now, instead of applying the signal directly to the chart, I added a Paint Bars indicator, which can “paint” based on a signal (which is chosen from the indicator preferences window). I also set the indicator to paint the background instead of the bars.

Here is the link to Charthub which contains the definition for the chart and the signal: http://www.charthub.com/images/2009/07/07/rhONshading.png

Hope some of you find this useful!