Candle Hunter

Candle Hunter allows you to seek out any of fourteen different candlestick patterns in your charts. This SlopeCharts extra is an exclusive feature for Silver, Gold, and Platinum members (to learn about Slope memberships, click here).

To use it, choose Candle Hunter from the Tools menu;


Tools

That brings up a dialog box in which you can check off any (or all) of these candle patterns.


Patterns

Any chart you look at will then tint any patterns that have been found. If you point at a pattern, the name of the pattern will be revealed.


Mouseover

Two things I’ve discovered during my testing of this feature:

(1) There are a LOT of candlestick patterns. Let’s face it, these patterns are based on just one, two, or three bars, thus you are going to get a tremendous number of results. You can press Ctrl-P to hide prices to make the instances of the patterns more obvious.

(2) You may find it more useful to examine candlesticks by using Weekly or Monthly charts, since obviously there will be fewer “hits” and the patterns may be more powerful.

Here is an example:


tinting

You can even fine-tune every single one of the fourteen tints in terms of color, opacity, and so forth. Just click the Styles tab in the Candle Hunter dialog box, choose whatever pattern from the dropdown you want to change, and set the style to your liking.


Colors

The changes you make to the colors will be retained in your account for each pattern.

More important that this is that you can adjust the parameters of every single pattern. In other words, each of the fourteen patterns has its own settings with respect to one candlestick’s relationship with another.

Here is one example below: the Bearish Engulfing pattern. Each pattern choice from the dropdown will present to you a simplified, idealized graphic representation of what that pattern looks like and offer you input boxes if you want to change any of the defaults.


bearish

As with the colors, these tweaks and modifications are saved to your own account so that no matter where you are using SlopeCharts, these customizations will be ready to use. The simple fact is that you can greatly improve the quality (and limit the quantity) of candlestick “hits” by using these new parameters.

Another nice feature is the ability to preserve patterns. If you see a candlestick pattern that you’d like to save permanently as a drawn object, just right-click on it and “keep” it:


keepit