Metastock Pro intraday chart - how to display

[mishki]

Hello,

I have downloaded some intraday 1-min quotes and used The Downloader from Equis to convert the file to Metastock format. The file I used as input is an xls and looks like this:

Date Time Open High Low Close Volume
11/08/2010 09:30:00 624.02 624.02 624 624.01 21758
11/08/2010 09:31:00 624.01 624.85 623.13 624.32 9130
11/08/2010 09:32:00 624.51 624.86 624.3 624.86 7835
11/08/2010 09:33:00 624.89 625 624.7 624.73 6413
...

As you can see, I have one line for every minute. When using The Downloader to convert it, for 'minutes per bar' I entered 1. The Downloader says convertion went ok and no error appeared and it says it created a file with the same number of lines as my input file.

When opening the file in Metastock to view the chart, it sees the file, it correctly sees that the periodicity is 1 minute, but when I open the file,
Metastock prints a chart that has only 1 bar per day, and the displayed bar represents the last minute of each trading day. I have a attached a picture of the chart in Metastock.

Any hint as to what I might be doind wrong is highly appreciated.

Thank you,
Mihaela

 

[Wallace]

does the data have too many digits in the timestamp ?
delete the last :00 re-convert and see if that makes any difference

 

[mishki]

Thank you for the suggestion, but, unfortunately, the output is the same. Do you use The Downloader to convert intraday data ? I would appreciate a glimpse of an input file because I suspect the problem is with my file and I should compare it byte by byte with a valid (tested) file.

Either this is wrong, or my version of Metastock Pro needs some settings I don't know about.

Or maybe somebody else uses The Downloader and would like to help me ?

 

[Wallace]

the small file I've attached is eurusd 1 min data: D T O H L C V
funnily enough the timestamp has an extra 0
the data I think came direct from MetaTrader 3 via a convertor called ToMetaStock

originally I was going to suggest you save your file from xls to ascii text - try that

I've had the same problem but can't remember how I resolved it except it might have
been done by changing the date format, I've also used a program called Convert2

if the txt suggestion doesn't work - make sure there's only price data on the file -
nothing preceeding/above the data - post your file or part of it and I'll try converting it
and see what happens

 

[mishki]

Thank you very much. It seems that it had to do with the Excel file. I have converted the same data to ASCII and then used The Downloader to convert it and it worked like a charm.

So if anyone else is having some problems with the conversion, they must try with an ASCII file. The Downloader explains in its Help exactly what the expected format is for the ASCII file. At the same time, it says very little about xls...

The conclusion is: don't try xls -> Metastock format with The Downloader. The safest and easiest way is using ASCII (csv).

Regarding the 3 digits you mentioned, it is also specified in The Downloader's help that this is a correct format too, the 3 digits are the tick count (0 to 999).