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Answers to Common Questions

   

Question

I am trying to determine if IRT has the drawing tool feature which calculates the difference in price between two chosen price bars. It would be applied similar to drawing a trendline, but would calculate the difference in price between those two points as either price or percent change.
   

Answer

Yes, use the “Rectangle” tool. First go to Setup: Preferences: Technical Indicators and choose “Rectangle / Owl”. When the preferences appear, make sure the “Owl” checkbox is unchecked. Press OK. This setting enables the “Rectangle (Owl)” drawing tool to behave as a simple rectangle drawing tool.

With your chart window open, click on the “Rectangle (Owl)” tool on the chart toolbar. The cursor will change to a pencil to indicate you may use the mouse to draw. Draw a rectangle inside your chart encompassing the period of time from some starting bar to some ending bar. Mouse down at the starting bar and drag the mouse to the ending bar and release the mouse. A rectangle will appear around that period of time labeled with the number of bars and the price change over that period of time. Here is a screen short showing you how it looks:

http://www.charthub.com/images/2007/01/21/Apple_Chart.png

In this example, you can see that the 35 bar climb in AAPL share price took the shares $20.56 higher. At present we do not show the % move; that would be a nice addition to this capability.

Note also that after drawing a rectangle you can easily adjust the size and position of the rectangle using the keyboard. First, click on the rectangle to “Select” it. When selected, the rectangle will show small circles at each of the four corners.

The keyboard left/right arrow keys move the entire rectangle left or right, adjusting the price move feedback accordingly.

Hold down the shift key and use left/right arrow keys to expand/contract the size of the rectangle by adjusting the left side.

Hold down the Ctrl key and use left/right arrow keys to expand/contract the size of the rectangle by adjusting the right side.