Modifying Trading Hours

If you wish to disable auto trading during certain hours of the day, you can insert a formula to control when to trade and not to trade.

You need to determine the hours in 24 hour format, based on the Time Zone that Sierra Chart is set to trade in. If you need to verify the time zone, go to Global Settings>>Data Trade Service Settings.

In order to do enable trading during specific hours, you will need to modify the spreadsheet. This should only done by people who are familiar with Sierra Chart spreadsheets.

  1. Open the spreadsheet for the chart you want to manage trading hours with.
  2. In the upper left corner, select Sheet1 for Chart #1, or Sheet2 for Chart #2.
  3. Go to cell J28 and double click to edit the cell.
  4. Pick one of the following formulas depending on whether the time to trade occurs During the Day (e.g. between 09:00:00 and 16:00:00)  or if trading hours Extend Past Midnight (e.g. Globex). Your time zone and where you trade may make a difference too.

    During the Day

For example, Begin Auto Trading at 09:30:00 and end at 16:00:00

Insert this formula into J28:

=AND(OR(J41-INT(J41 <TIMEVALUE(“09:30:00”),
J41-INT(J41)>TIMEVALUE(“16:00:00”)))

Extend Past Midnight:

For example, Begin Auto Trading at 18:00:00 and end at 9:29:59 the following morning.

Insert this formula into J28:

=!AND((AND(J$41-INT(J$41)<TIMEVALUE(“18:00:00”),J$41-INT(J$41)>=TIMEVALUE(“09:29:59”))))

Save the Spread Sheet

Do File>>Save to save the changes to the spread sheet.

Note that if you understand the logic of the formula it is actually disabling trading when the formula evaluates to a 1. Cell J$41 is the date and time of the current bar. The Integer part of that is a number for the date, and the decimal part is the time of day. The Timevalue() function converts the time of day in HH:MM:SS notation to a number between 0 and 1.