We are often asked “How can I access the active (red) bar being formed.” The answer is that the lead indicator will access that bar, because it is really a future bar. You have to use the chart recalculate feature before the lead indicator will work, however. Also you won’t get new values as they change until you recalculate again. Right click on the chart to bring up a menu with “recalculate chart” on it.

We’re not even sure of all the uses of this new 5.0 feature yet. Here are two:

Suppose you make a daily chart which fires a signal at the end of the day, and it is based on closing price. You realize you can’t fill a trade based upon that signal until the next morning’s open. Then you wonder, “Wouldn’t my prediction work better if it used tomorrow’s open instead of today’s close?” To backtest that idea, you stick in a Lead(Open,1) into the strategy to replace Close. But when you go to trade the strategy you remember that the Lead won’t work at the open, because the red daily bar has just started to form. That is why we built Recalculate Chart, which you will see if you right click on a blank part of the chart. As soon as you recalculate, the model fires, and the Lead works on the red bar, giving your model the open value. Thus you can get your signal at the open.

There are many of you who want to fire your model at 3:55 PM EST, just before the Close. Recalculate will do that for you too – just use Lead(Close,1) instead of Close. Of course during backtesting, you’ll use Close instead of Lead(Close,1).