Volume bars are great. They would be a lot more useful for me, however, if you could associate the base size with the instrument instead of the data series. If I am:
1. Displaying symbols in a market analyzer
2. Sharing a chart across several symbols
3. Running a backtest
and those symbols have very different average volumes, then I can't use volume bars because they will be so different. For example -- average stocks may trade 1 to 10 million shares per day. SPY trades 250 million.
What you could do, is allow a 'base size' to be set on the instrument. I would set this to, for example, 250,000,000 for SPY, which is the 20 day volume average. When you set up a chart or market analyzer using volume bars, what you would select is not a raw volume number, but a divisor. This would give you a rough way of estimating how many bars there would be in an average day, as well as allowing you to make rough comparisons across symbols with different volume characteristics. For example, I'd type in 100. This would make each bar have a volume quantity 2,500,000 and let me know the rough potential size of the chart.
I will say I only started using volume bars recently and am still experimenting with them; there may be plenty of reasons to not do this. Just some thoughts.
1. Displaying symbols in a market analyzer
2. Sharing a chart across several symbols
3. Running a backtest
and those symbols have very different average volumes, then I can't use volume bars because they will be so different. For example -- average stocks may trade 1 to 10 million shares per day. SPY trades 250 million.
What you could do, is allow a 'base size' to be set on the instrument. I would set this to, for example, 250,000,000 for SPY, which is the 20 day volume average. When you set up a chart or market analyzer using volume bars, what you would select is not a raw volume number, but a divisor. This would give you a rough way of estimating how many bars there would be in an average day, as well as allowing you to make rough comparisons across symbols with different volume characteristics. For example, I'd type in 100. This would make each bar have a volume quantity 2,500,000 and let me know the rough potential size of the chart.
I will say I only started using volume bars recently and am still experimenting with them; there may be plenty of reasons to not do this. Just some thoughts.
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