RTD - Using the 17 customs studies to send data to Excel

[curiousjeff]

The "help on data export" (export menu in the trade tab) will display 17 custom studies available.





To use these studies in RTD:

For some strange reason, the 17 custom studies are NOT available in the study menu under the charts tab.

You will find them here:

Go to your watchlist, right click on the header of any column, and then select "customize"



Here you will see the 17 custom studies:



Click once on the study you want to modify, then click again on the paper scroll symbol:





You must create a script that will generate only one item/number.
Some Thinkscript commands will not work.

Example using the forceindex script from TOS:

declare lower;

input length = 13;

plot FI = ExpAverage(data = (close - close[1]) * volume, length);

In Excel, use this command:

=RTD("tos.rtd",,"CUSTOM1","SPY")

You can check that all is working correctly by adding the study as a column in your watchlist:



In Excel, you will first get a "loading" message and it can take some time to display, but if you have a number in your watchlist, it must give the same in Excel.

Credit: I found this procedure in a PDF from R. Kaczmarek / John Locke's site.


P.S. After further test, I could only make it work if the ticker requested in Excel was in the active watchlist and the custom study was present as a column in that same watchlist.

 

[Ron Bertino]

Word of warning: if you change the name of one of these, say from CUSTOM1 to MyMagicIndicator, then Excel RTD will still refer to it as CUSTOM1, yet you will have easily forgotten which one of your many indicators was the one that used to be called CUSTOM1.
Therefore, my suggestion is to rename it to something like C1_MyMagicIndicator or MyMagicIndicator_C1
You want to have something in the name of the indicator that lets you know the underlying name that Excel RTD will be referencing (CUSTOM1).

 

[FrankTheTank]

Well I am in well above my head here. I am trying to pull in either next earnings date or days to earnings to Excel using RTD. I found this custom quote that seems to work when I use it in my watchlist. I renamed it to "earnings"


Would I just use the field "earnings" in RTD now like this? It does not seem to work. Maybe it has to be a "study" and not a quote?

 

[curiousjeff]

You must call it using the original custom name (custom1,2,3,....). You can change its name in TOS but you must us this RTD syntax:

=RTD("tos.rtd",,"CUSTOM1",A4)

See above Ron's post about changing the name of a custom study.

 

[Hans]

Using these CUSTOM fields, one can also pull in market indicators. Makes it easy to keep information on trades and market conditions all on one monitor sheet. Basic example for OBV Trend, ATR Trend, STFS Bias, FI and Term Structure included on the attached spreadsheet. Color coding as in the TOS chart can be accomplished by conditional formatting.

As Jeff indicated, the CUSTOM indicators need to be displayed in the active watchlist (but one can minimize their column width). The underlying(s) of interest also need to be in the watchlist.