Tutorial177_consolidator | Recognizing periods of consolidation

Consolidation describes a period in time when a stock or security is not in or reversing a larger price trend. During consolidation the instrument typically trades within a limited price range. Tutorial 177 is a TradeStation EasyLanguage tutorial that attempts to recognize periods of consolidation by calculating:

1) The standard deviation of price.
2) The ‘Consolidation Index’ by taking the average of true high over a number of bars, subtracting the average of the true low and dividing the result by the Average True Range.

The tutorial program then looks for when these values go below a user input percentile.

When a period of possible consolidation is found, tutorial 177 draws a box around it with the high of the box being the highest close of the price in the box and the low being the lowest low close of price in the box.

Because periods of consolidation are sometimes associated with low volume the tutorial also changes the color of the boxes when volume is below the average volume. The colors are also determined by user inputs.

This tutorial illustrates various programming techniques, including:

- Drawing rectangle and text drawing objects using BNPoints and XYPoints to specify their size and/or position
- Creating methods to draw rectangles and calling the methods
- Extending rectangles as new price bars form
- Modifying drawing object colors and transparency
- Using intrabarpersist booleans to detect when a percentile has been crossed

See https://markplex.com/free-tutorials/_tutorial177_consolidator-recognizing-periods-of-consolidation/