Thanks for training session on divergence. Is there some book, other than the formula primer, that explains the various programming techniques. For example, there is one section of the code in Jose's formula that you were not sure about. He obviously did not invent that, it must be part of the programming language that MetaStock uses. Is there some reference that you can recommend. Thanks.

Patrick, thanks for the reply and the thought provoking training sessions. I must say that when I first read the Formula Primer many moons ago, I thought that the manual was pretty basic and did not pay sufficient attention to it. After re-reading the Primer and tackling some of the formulas posted here, I am beginning to understand some of the subtleties of the language. Understanding what is understood by the language when writing formulas is essential. Looking at the many divergence formulas that I have found, I find that none of the formulas matches the divergences that I draw on the charts. One of the issues has to do with the fact that the peaks and troughs do not occur on the same dates, but some slight time difference apart. What I would like to do is to find a peak on the indicator and then find the last peak that was higher than the first peak. Once that is done I would see if the slope of the line connecting the price bars that occurred on the dates when the indicator peaked is diverging from the slope of the line connecting the indicator peaks. The same approach would apply to the troughs. I might add another qualifier to the indicator peak that would weed out any peaks that happened below the indicator trigger line, if there is one. I find that if the peak occurs above the trigger line it improves the method results. I have not seen any divergence formulas with this approach. Since you have developed many divergence formulas for clients in the past, have you used or seen an approach as I have described?

Thanks for the lesson, Patrick. Unfortunately most of it goes over my head. I'm thankful that there is someone like yourself prepared to take the time to make these lessons available to the rest of us. Good on ya Patrick. :D

Well, I played around with this formula and tried some other approaches but nothing yet, may be impossible to get divergences programmed into MetaStock to the point where it duplicates visual observations. Something is wrong with the formula as shown. I changed the occurrence to 1, from 2, in the formula for P2 and got the indicator to plot. Not sure if this is the proper fix. Going to continue to work on this as I would like to get an Explorer and Expert that comes close to nailing the type of divergence patterns that interest me.

Dear Patrick, I am new to this forum as well as to Metastock. However, after listening to your first two videos, I have learnt the basics and trying to experiment in Metastock. In actual practice, what is your experience of success of various indicators. Can you list promising ones, having higher success rate. Thanking You rsarin :roll:

In trying to write the formula for divergence, I have found that the best way, and I have tried many different ways so far, to test for divergences is to check to see if there is a divergence of the price on the days that two peaks or troughs were made. I first test today's peak/trough with the last peak/trough and then test today's peak/trough with the second most recent peak/trough and then today's peak/trough with the third most recent peak/trough and so on until I tested as many as I want to write the formula code for. There might be a divergence of today's peak/trough with the tenth most recent peak/trough. Is there a way in MetaStock to write a loop, so that from i=1 to 20, or some other number, I can write the formula once with a variable, i, that will check today's peak/trough with the previous 20 occurences? This would make the formula a lot simpler and easier to edit. If it can't be done in MetaStock but could be done in a DLL, how could I learn to write a DLL? Thanks, Bill