Tutorial: Learning the Basics
The TradingSolutions Interface
Understanding Fields
Understanding Fields
i Tutorial Task
Understand TradingSolutions fields by viewing them in a spreadsheet and learning how to create different types of fields.
A field is a price, indicator, or other value for a piece of data. TradingSolutions stores all of its values in columns similar to a spreadsheet. Let’s see a collection of fields and learn how you can create your own.
Step-by-step Instructions
1. Right-click on the stock Amgen in the Portfolio View and select Display in Spreadsheet…. This will display the Display Spreadsheet Dialog.
Ä Note: If Amgen is not available in your portfolio, you can use any stock for this example.
Figure 1. Selecting "Add New Field…"
2. Click on Select new fields to display. This will present a list of fields that have been created for this stock.
Figure 2. Location of "Select new fields to display".
3. Let’s display all of the fields that have been imported or created for Amgen. Select "Amgen, Inc." from the top of the list of fields, then press Add Selected Fields. The list of currently selected fields should now look like this.
Figure 3. List of all fields added.
4. Press OK. This will display the selected fields in a spreadsheet.
Figure 4. Sample spreadsheet.
5. Notice how each field that we selected has a column in the spreadsheet. This includes imported price and volume data, calculations, signals, and signal analyses.
Ä Note: You can view additional areas of the spreadsheet using the scrollbars on the bottom and right sides of the spreadsheet window.
6. Locate the Primary Signal field. This is typically the field you are most interested in. The current value is the recommendation of what position you should be in for this stock. You can see the value for the current day in the Portfolio View for Amgen.
7. The majority of the other fields currently defined for Amgen were used to calculate or analyze this field. Let’s see what kinds of fields can be created. Right-click on Amgen in the Portfolio View and select Add New Field…. This will display the Create a Field Wizard.
Figure 5. Selecting "Add New Field…"
8. As can be seen from this wizard, there are several different types of fields available. You can quickly see that for almost any value you would want to calculate in TradingSolutions, you would do so by creating a field.
Figure 6. The Create a Field Wizard.
9. If you would like additional information about the individual types press the Help button. You can return to this tutorial page by pressing the Back button at the top of this window.
Figure 7. Location of Back button to return to tutorial from help.
10. Press the Video Help button in the upper right-hand corner of this dialog. Context-specific video helps are available from many context menus and wherever you see this icon.
Figure 8. Video Help button.
11. Look at the video help topics that are available. Feel free to view the video topics now or revisit them later. When you are finished, press the Close button.
12. Press Cancel to exit this wizard, or experiment with creating different types of fields before continuing on to the next task.
Congratulations, you should now have a good idea of what a field is and how it fits into the big picture. In the next task, we will see a quick example of how to create a trading signal based on multiple fields in a single step.
_ Continue to the next task.