Too Much Mousing

One of the features of Tradestation’s charting environment is giving the user access to the “Runcommand” from the keyboard. That command will execute macro like shortcuts when you press the “Enter” button. This allows you to change symbols, bar types and bar intervals without using the mouse which is painfully slow at executing the exact same commands through the menu or even from the pull down icons.

With a chart open, simply type the symbol you wish to see plotted on the chart and press “Enter” and the chart symbol is replaced with the new one you selected. Similarly you can select the bar type in the same way. If your chart is displaying minute based data, type “daily” to display daily bars. Type “weekly” or “monthly”to switch to long term bar types. If you have daily data plotted, and wish to see 15 minute bars, you type “15 minute” and hit “Enter” and the chart will plot 15 minute bars. If it is plotting 15 minute bars and you want to see 5 minute bars, simply type “5” and “Enter”. You do not type the quotes though for any of these run commands.

One thing you cannot do is to pull-up the special bar types. For instance if you type, “case” or “kagi” or “range”, you will get the “Symbol not found” error. It is OK though because those data types are badly flawed and should not be used by anyone serious about trading.