Viewing Long term Composite Charts

Three Common Reasons that Long Term Composite Charts are not viewable

Reason Number One

The Chart view period may be too short or, you may not understand that there are actually two different types of Daily Periodicities. Right Click in the chart to open the Chart Preferences. Then confirm that the view period matches the length of time you want to view. Then check the periodicity. Composite Charts are built using one minute bars so even if you want to view a Daily bar, you must specify the number of minutes in a day as opposed to just choosing a Periodicity of "Daily." So if you want to see bars that are equivalent to Daily bars for the 24 Hour Session, enter 1440 minutes. Always enter your desired periodicity in the number of Minutes. If you were just trying to view Daily price action without the volume at price (Composite), than choosing just "Daily" is fine.

Reason Number Two

Go to Setup:Preferences:Historical Data. The Historical Data retention dialog is divided into three sections. We are going to look at the middle section. Assuming you are trying to plot a long term composite chart on @ES#, you would choose this symbol and look at the number of one minute bars that IRT is setup to retain. Make sure this number is large enough for your needs. If you download 2000 days of one minute bars, but IRT is only set here to retain 300, IRT will purge (delete) everything in excess of 300 the next time a session ends. So data you downloaded today, may not be there tomorrow. The top section of this dialog contains the Global retention settings for all symbols so don't make the change there, otherwise you are telling IRT to retain 2000 days for all symbols which is probably too much. For larger retention periods, it's best to adjust the individual symbol by using the middle section of the Historical Data dialog.

Reason Number Three

You may not have enough data in your database. Now that the appropriate Historical Data retention settings have been done (Number 2 above), let's download. You can either right click in the chart and request a "Full Download" or hit Alt-D to bring up a download window and choose 1 Minute as the Periodicity and choose the number of days you'd like. I prefer using the latter method because a Full download retrieves more than the required data since it also downloads Daily and Tick Data based on your Historical Data Settings. Either way works.