Hi everyone,
Does anyone know how to display range bars in Heikin Ashi format, on any platforms, please?
I don’t need and don’t want the original range bars from which the HA bars are constructed to be displayed, just the HA ones.
It’s terribly difficult to get any information that helps, about this, including by asking brokers and trading-platform support staff!
Thank you, @samewise , but I believe that (like almost all trading platforms) it offers HA bars as one of the alternatives to range bars and other types of bars.
I’m asking how to display range bars in Heikin Ashi format.
Ah gotcha. Yea I guess I don’t know what range bars are. But now I see an option for range bars in that TV list. But you want to create those range bars using HA. Now I get it.
That’s a weird chart! I’m looking at EURUSD right now.
No, no. The opposite. Sorry if I haven’t explained it well. 
HA bars are calculated from inputs defined by the metrics of the previous bar. I’m trying to use HA bars calculated from the metrics of a previous range bar, rather than from those of a previous timed bar, volume bar, or whatever other bar type people more often derive them from.
But thank you for trying to help me. 
Welcome to the forum. 
The nature of your question above suggests that you’re considerably further on than “only just trading”?
Which instrument(s) are you actually trading?
The answer to your question may well depend on that.
For example, what you’re asking about is readily available in Tradovate: for any chart, just select your desired range parameter under “time period” (it’s not a time period, obviously, but that’s where it lives, in Tradovate) and then select Heikin Ashi under “chart type”. All done for you. But note, also, that any indicators you might also display in Tradovate will then be calculated as a default from the HA bars displayed, not (as one might expect) from the unseen range bars from which those HA bars are derived.
But all of that’s no use to you, obviously, if you’re trading CFD’s, because you can‘t trade those with Tradovate.
I guess this functionality will also be available in NinjaTrader, because NT now owns Tradovate (brokerage and platform) and most of the more advanced features of Tradovate - like all their newer ATM functions - have originally come from NT.
Another guess is that it’s also available in SierraChart, because that’s probably the world’s best off-the-shelf platform and has just about everything that almost anyone could ever need, in there somewhere, if they can work out how to find it! But that’s only for people who are willing to be SierraChart customers, which excludes me, so I could be wrong about it.
Another way you could do this, of course, would be to go to a coder/programmer (“techie”) and pay to have something made for you. I have absolutely no idea what it would cost.
But It strikes me that there’s also a free, very easy, non-techie way you could at least approximate, if not duplicate, this functionality: open two charts for whatever instrument you’re using; on one, display whatever range bar setting you want to use, and anything else you need apart from the HA bars, and add the ATR (ATR-15 or ATR-20, maybe?). On the other, set the chart-speed in seconds or minutes or ticks or volume or whatever you want, adjusting it so that the ATR displayed is the same as on the first chart. Voilà! Job done?
It won’t be dead accurate bar-to-bar, admittedly, but the overall picture should serve exactly the same purpose.
Might that “fast and dirty equivalent” be good enough for you?
You should surely be able to do that on any proper, reasonable trading platform? (Not MetaTrader, I dare say, but you can’t be a MT user and be asking what you‘re asking above?!).
Does this help? If it doesn’t, just say so and I’ll try again.
You can do what you want, but in the end, the PRICE is the PRICE, which is what you need to be trading, you will be trading, nothing else.
But sure, go ahead and torture the PRICE into any which way, shape or form that you want.
But please come back in one year and update this thread with how much that assisted making a profit, any profit, I dare you.
Good Luck.
Interesting comment - do you think range bars are “torturing the price” more than timed bars are, @FOK ?
Let’s see the results, who has some to share?
All the professional traders I know who use range bars would say the exact opposite.
And one would certainly hope so, because range bars were invented as a way to avoid torturing the price so artificially by presenting it in the form of artificial, timed bars, which didn’t allow for different volumes and scale of movements at different times of day - didn’t even allow for lunchtime!
It was a good solution to a real problem.
Not many people, I’d think, because so many range bar traders are salaried professionals not allowed under their terms of employment to disclose much about their work.
How do range bars “allow for lunchtime”?
It might depend where in the world they are, with time zones? It is always lunchtime somewhere?! 
Lol, well, lunchtimes vary in their effects, within the trading world, don’t they?!
To be honest I was hoping not to continue the conversation, here, now that the OP’s been removed and gone off to another forum instead, and because range bars displayed in HA format are of pretty limited relevance to Babypips anyway. But what I think you’re maybe both asking about does relate more generally to the overall difference between timed charts and other types, which is certainly relevant. So …
Some lunchtimes are very important! Just one example (and a deliberately extreme one): in Tokyo the stock exchange actually closes for an hour at lunchtime, and as you’d expect, that has big and important effects on both the NKD-index and Yen pairs.
If you use timed bars, the lower volume and lower volatility of that hour-long period are going to have significant effects on your technical analysis (indicators and/or price action) if you’re using anything shorter than 4-hour bars.
The same’s true (of other indices/pairs) to a slightly lesser extent at the other sessions’ “lunchtimes” (i.e. quieter trading times) too.
Using non-timed bars (HA, volume, renko, range, whatever) “allows for this” in ways that timed charts don’t.
On trading floors, whether physical or (more often) virtual ones, and even among a lot of successful independents, it’s actually a huge issue, because not so many people are using timed charts as is so among people posting in forums.
NB: “HA charts” can be either timed or untimed, of course, but this thread was about untimed ones!
I read the whole thread (twice!) and find it interesting, but still don’t quite understand it all.
I know what range bars and HA candles are, but don’t know why are some people using range-bars displayed in HA format: what’s the advantage?
(No hurry at all to reply - I’m asking only out of curiosity and general interest! )
I’m maybe not the right person to ask, because I don’t use them, myself.
I’m not sure anyone here does, though undoubtedly a lot of professional traders do (and some people certainly did, at places where I’ve worked in the past).
It will sound a totally boring and maybe predictable answer, but I think my best shot, here, is to say that it’s a way of combining the “advantages of range bars” with the “advantages of Heikin Ashi display”, for people who want the benefits of both, at the same time. (And let’s be honest, they’ll nearly all be people making their livings from trading, one way or another - so they do, collectively, know what they’re doing!).
And since that probably sounds a bit useless on its own, I’ll include a little list here, of what I was always told about combining the two - (please bear in mind that I can’t actually vouch for it from direct, personal experience, though!) -
This is probably the most interesting thread I’ve found here, so far. Partly, perhaps, because of my own lack of knowledge: until reading all this, I didn’t even know that range bars displayed in Heikin Ashi format was a “thing” at all.
Let alone that institutional pro’s are using them.
I happen to have Tradovate at the moment because I’m slowly doing a prop-firm eval, so I (easily) followed the instructions above to look at these.
They’re seriously weird, but maybe “weird and wonderful” and I can’t stop watching them. It’s so peculiar when a bar closes, seeing the next one open “already half completed”. But fascinating.
I’m experimenting with “price action” with them, and looking at a couple of indicators, too.
Very glad to have found this thread, and posting in it to keep it active (if nothing else). Any further tips/information will be gladly received!
