How To Use Prism

 

Welcome to the How To Use Prism

 

Prism is a compact dashboard or grid that allows you to watch buy and sell signals on a broad array of symbols in a single glance.  It will allow you to quickly see buy and sells and when they change.  You can also click on a summary to automatically generate a composite index and get a chart showing what percent of the symbols in the column are in a buy mode.

 

Building a new Prism

 

You can bring up a new prism window from either the Circle menu or the main menu under components. 

 

 

This will launch a prism window from the component menu.

 

 

 

If you wish to add this window to the desktop, see "How to Use Workspaces".

 

A prism is a grid with rows of symbols and columns of studies. To get started we are going to add some symbols to the prism.  Either click the add symbol button at the top or right click and select add symbol.

 

 

 

After adding some symbols, next we want to add a study to the prism.  Either click the "Add Column" button from the top menu or from the right click menu. Once the add column window opens we can add price values just like a quote list but in our case we want to add a study. Any study that has a buy and sell signal will be listed in the box on the left.  Click on the study that you want to monitor the buy and sell signals, in this case we will use the momentum study

 

 

 

After clicking on a study a list of study properties is listed in the property window on the right. 

 

Long Signal Name - The main name of the study, this is not used by the prism.

 

Short Signal Name - this is a short version of the study name and this will be the name in the column header.

 

Timespan - This is the length of the bars I will be monitoring, this can be changes from 1 minute bars to monthly bars.

 

Use Extended Hours - If true, the prism will use bars from non market hours as well market hours.  This is useful for trading futures overnight.

 

Use End of Bar - If true (the default) the prism will only display the state of the last closed bar.  If false, the current state will change real time.  Just a word of caution, if you use real time the study can rapidly oscillate between long and short as the tick moves around.

 

Column Alignment - describes how the text will be aligned in the column.

 

Signal Inputs - You can change the values of the study here.  If you don’t like a momentum of length 27 bars you can change it here, or click in length2 and set a moving average on the basic momentum.

 

Signal Conditions - This describes how the buy and sell signals will be displayed in the prism

 

Text - This is text that is displayed in the prism.  If you don’t use LONG you must go to

Preferences and change the name used to calculate percent long.

 

Color - This is the color that will be displayed in the prism if the Use Them Color is turned off.

 

Use Theme Color - If this is true the signal will use the default buy and sell colors listed in preferences.

 

The prism now fills with whether each symbol's daily momentum 27 is currently in a buy or a sell.  If you have an *next  to the long or short it indicates it changed in the last active bar (it's a new signal).  At the bottom it will show the percent in the list are long. 

 

 

 

Once the prism has completed filling  it should automatically size the columns to keep the grid as small as possible.  If it doesn’t click the auto Size button in the top or right click menu.

 

You can sort a column so the longs or shorts will be at the top by clicking  the column header.  Continued clicking in the column header will toggle between an ascending and a descending sort.  Once sorted it will stay in that order even after the signals change.  To unsort click "Turn off sort" in the top or right click toolbars.

 

If you wish to delete a symbol,  click on the row and select delete symbol from the top menu or right click on the symbol and select delete symbol.

 

To insert a symbol click on the row to insert above and click on insert symbol from the top menu or right click on the symbol and select insert.

 

Edit Column

 

Anytime you need to change the properties of the column, right click in the column and select edit column.  You can change any of the values and click save, The prism will then recalculate with the new values.

 

You can also move the columns by dragging and dropping the column headers into their new position.

 

Save and Open Prism.

 

You can save the current prism by right clicking and selecting "File" ==> "Save".  Just enter in a name for the prism and press save.  Whenever you want to recalled the prism you can right click and select "File" ==> "Open" or click the pull down at the top of the window and select the name of your prism.

 

Viewing a Prism Cell

 

This prism can be linked to any number of charts to see the current study.

 

 

 

 If you click "Link" from the top menu or right click menu you can see  which charts the prism it is linked to.  After selecting which charts to link to the prism, when you click in a grid cell, the chart of the symbol, timespan, and study will be shown in the chart.  If you click on the summary value you will get a chart of the percent total studies long in the column. 

 

 

 

This is great for plurality comparison to an index.  The chart will move from 0 to 100 long.

 

As in most windows you can find additional tips at the bottom of the right click menu.