NOTE: In NeuroShell Trader, open the chart named “Example 4 – Building Formulas” which is the basis for following example:

In this example, we enter a formula into the Indicator Wizard. Formulas are not entered in the usual way, because the Indicator Wizard is all point and click. Therefore, it is hard to make the usual kinds of mistakes, like not matching parentheses. On the other hand, if you are used to entering formulas from left to right, character by character, the Indicator Wizard may take some getting used to.

Let us suppose that we have read somewhere that a wonderful indicator could be coded with the following formula (where * means multiply as is usual in computing terminology):

(0.6 * (high-low)/open + 0.4 * (previous high – previous low)/previous open) * 100

We can put this into the Indicator Wizard either as top-down, bottom-up, or a combination of the two. We would use indicators exclusively from the Arithmetic category.

If you wanted to make the indicator top-down, you’d notice that at the highest level, the indicator is a long term in parens times 100. So the first indicator you’d insert would be Multiply2.

However, we preferred to do a combination, inserting several of the lower level terms and then combining them. So we first built the following two terms:

(high-low)/open

(previous high – previous low)/previous open)

They are both made with the Divide indicator in which the numerator is a Subtract indicator. We renamed them term 1 and term 2 on the chart so you can find them. We renamed them by right clicking on each of them (or their legends) and selecting Format Selected Indicator. You can double click on them to see how they were made.

Then we only had to build:

(0.6*term1 + 0.4*term2)*100

which was quite easy to do top down as Multiply2(Add2(Multiply2,Multiply2))