How to show current trade arrows on an Amibroker chart

Hey, Adrian here, founder of Enlightened Stock Trading. In this video, I’ve got an Amibroker tip for you that’s going to save you hours of frustration. Have you ever run a backtest in Amibroker and then wanted to look at the trades on the chart and see exactly where it entered and exactly where it exited, so that you can look at whether the backtest is doing the right thing, whether you can come up with any ideas about how to better improve your entry or improve your exit? Well, there is a way to do it, but you may find that your Amibroker doesn’t do it for you.

So when you run a backtest and you get the trade log, if you right click on one of these trades and select show current trade arrows, what should happen is the chart that’s open should automatically take you to that trade, but as you can see, it hasn’t actually moved the chart. You can’t see the arrows because that trade I clicked on was in 2011, and the chart is still sitting here on the present day.

So what you’ve got to do to make this work, and this is so, so powerful and so useful, is if you click on the chart and select properties, and then under axis and grid, come down here to show trading arrows, and just click yes, and then click okay. Once you’ve done that, if you go back here again, if we right click here and go show current trade arrows, watch what happens.

Look now. It’s taken us to the exact trade on this chart, and this is a short system, so it entered short here and exited short there. We can try this with another trade. Let’s look at BCI. Right click here, show current trade arrows, and look, it’s moved the chart, and it’s taken us to the short entry here, and the short position was covered there. So if you find, when you’re trying to show the current trade errors and look at the trades from your backtest on the charts and it’s not actually taking you there, it’s probably because on your chart, you don’t have this parameter value set in the axis and grid show current trading errors setting to yes. If you do that, you can run a backtest, and all you have to do is right click show current trade arrows, and chart will take you to that trade, so you can see exactly where that trade entered and exited on the chart.

So, so powerful because what allows you to do is see, did my entry rules get me in at a sensible time? Did my exit rules get me out of the sensible time? Or should I have exited more quickly or exited more slowly? Or in my entry, did I leave too much profit on the table by waiting for too much confirmation? You can answer questions like this by plotting the entries and exits on the chart and evaluating them.

So what I love to do when I run a backtest or when I’m developing a system is create the system, code it up, run the backtest and then look at many, many trades. So I look at the entry and exit arrows using this method for 10, 15, 20, 30 trades or more, and try and use that to come up with ideas on how to make the system even better.

So I hope that helps. One simple trick to make your Amibroker life so much easier. That’s all for this video. I’ll see you in the next one. Bye for now.