The MarketDelta Blog

The Real-Time Language (RTL) within MarketDelta allows anyone to harness the program’s internal compiler for building custom technical indicators. Access to RTL is available in the Professional versions of MarketDelta.

MarketDelta offers a wide assortment of technical analysis tools to please chart enthusiasts, especially novel indicators such as the Volume Breakdown, Profile and TPO indicators, as well as numerous tools designed for statistical analysis. But sometimes you may want to take matters into your own hands. Using RTL, you can design your own indicators or mirror those you’ve seen elsewhere.

The “3/10 Oscillator” is a simple technical analysis indicator made famous by trader and educator Linda Raschke (who appears in the popular book, New Market Wizards). As with most oscillators, the 3/10 is an effective way to gauge momentum and see price divergence. The 3/10 oscillator resembles other well-known oscillators, such as the MACD, RSI and Stochastic indicators. Its calculation is particularly basic. The main oscillator charts the difference between 3-period and 10-period simple moving averages, hence its name. To smooth the results, a signal line overlays the oscillator, comprised of a single 16-period moving average of the indicator itself.

Despite its popularity, the 3/10 oscillator is not included in most charting platforms, which often leaves traders wondering how they can use it. However, it is easy to build one in MarketDelta. This process shows you the basics of using RTL.

To begin, open any multi-pane chart in MarketDelta to which you wish to apply this new custom indicator.

Then, click the Open RTL button on the main MarketDelta toolbar, and choose Open Custom Indicator from the pop-up menu. (Don’t see an RTL button? See this article.) A new pop-up menu will then appear:

From this new window, choose the first option, New Custom Indicator, then press OK.

A new pop-up RTL window appears:

“Tokens” are the results of other program indicators or references that may be used in RTL. The list above shows all these different tokens you can add to your new Custom Indicator.

Since the 3/10 oscillator is the difference of two moving averages, we will need to add 2 tokens, both of which are a moving average with a specific setting.

Scroll down in this list to find “MA: Moving Average” and double-click this token. A pop-up window for the MA will appear:

Our first MA token will be for the 10-period moving average that is part of the 3/10 oscillator. So make sure it says “Simple” and a period of “10″ and press OK. The token appears to the right of the RTL window now:

Now add another MA token in the same way, but double-clicking the MA from the list on the left of the window, and this time choosing “3″ for the period. Once you click OK, the program will prompt you to rename this token, since you cannot have two tokens with the same name as “MA.” So, feel free to rename it as anything you wish, such as “MA_three.”

Next comes the actual RTL programming to create the token.

The 3/10 oscillator is defined as the difference between a 3-period and 10-period moving average. These two moving averages already exist now as RTL tokens, each with a specific name as listed in the “Token” column on the right of the window.

Thus, our RTL code will simply say:

MA_three-MA

Type this into the code box at the bottom of the RTL window. The code *is* case-sensitive:

If desired, press the “Check” button to see if the program understands your RTL code. In particularly complex custom RTL coding, this is useful.

If all’s good, save your new indicator pressing the “Save” button, and give it a name. If you are making changes to an existing indicator and want to save them under a new indicator name, use the “Save As” button.

At this point, you have two options. The indicator has now been created and saved. You can either exit this window and apply it to any chart, or you can have it automatically applied to the currently-selected chart in the program by pressing the “Send To” button and selecting “Chart – Custom Indicator.”

If you choose to add a custom indicator later to any chart, press the “Insert” key for the shortcut window to add an indicator, and click “Custom Indicator.” This displays the option on the right of the screen to select the RTL indicator you recently created and saved:

Select the custom indicator you want, and press the “Add and Close” button. It will now appear on the chart:

Next, we need to add the 16-period moving average to the custom indicator for the smoothing signal that is a part of the 3/10 oscillator.

Technically, this is called an “indicator of an indicator,” since we are adding one indicator to analyze the results of another indicator. In RTL, this is an entirely separate indicator.

Open the RTL window again, using the steps from above to create a new custom indicator.

Now, here’s a simple shortcut to create the signal line and add the tokens to the RTL window automatically. In the RTL code box at the bottom of this window, simply type:

MA(CI)

In this case the “CI” stands for “Custom Indicator.”

Press “Save” and since you had not already pulled in the tokens, MarketDelta will prompt you for the settings for both the moving average as well as the custom indicator. You can set the MA to 16, and then just select your recently-named 3/10 indicator for the CI pop-up.

Once this is done, the tokens will appear in the RTL window, and you can save the indicator as you did the last one. Note: though this indicator is associated with the 3/10, you must save it as a new indicator with a unique name. Perhaps “310_signal” or similar is appropriate.

Next, add this second custom indicator to the chart, either by using the “Send To” button as noted before, or by manually adding the indicator using the “Insert” button.

It will appear at as an entirely separate pane in the chart:

Next, we want to move the signal line to the original 3/10 indicator pane we first added, so they are not on separate panes. To make sure the signal is clearly obvious after they both appear on the same pane, first change the color of the signal line by double-clicking it and adjusting the color settings. (You must double-click right on the line itself to get these settings, which is the same process as changing settings for any indicator.)

After you change the color, click once on the signal line so it is clearly selected (the line will appear bold). Then drag this line up onto the original 3/10 pane. It will move and appear overlaid, so the full 3/10 oscillator with signal is apparent:

Congratulations!

One simple step you can do to clean up a chart after you dragged indicators around is to auto-resize the panes. Right-click on the chart and choose “Size Panes” followed by “Instrument Panes 75%” or whichever option you prefer.

While the math in this particular indicator is quite simple, it outlines the process of converting a concept into programming code and then into a visual representation of that code, using RTL.

But it doesn’t stop there. You can harness many powerful built-in indicators, such as Session Statistics, to create entirely new ways of looking at the market, all using this same process.