eSignal Symbol Reference

Many of us are now using the Acuity charting package developed by Top Gun Software. Acuity gets its data from eSignal. Most of us trade only major forex pairs but for those who are interested in other markets I created this document to help you chart other markets, including metals, stocks and futures. eSignal provides real time prices from 100’s of exchanges across the globe.

FOREX

Basic Charting

Most forex pairs are entered by entering them as they are normally written (without and – or / between the two currencies) followed by A0-FX. For example, the EUR/JPY pair would be entered as “EURJPY A0-FX”. The exception is where the USD is part of the pair, the USD is omitted from the symbol, whether it’s the base or the cross. For example, the EUR/USD is entered as “EUR A0-FX” and USD/CHF is represented as “CHF A0-FX”.

Inverse Charts

You can directly chart the inverse of most forex pairs by entering them in reverse. For example, GBP/CHF is a standard forex pair but you can chart the inverse of that pair (1 / price), essentially the CHF/GBP pair, by entering it directly: CHFGBP A0-FX. For USD crosses, enter the full pir as you would any other currency. To Chart the inverse of the EUR/USD (eSignal symbol EUR A0-FX) enter it as USDEUR A0-FX. This does not appear to work on pairs where the USD is the base (the first currency in the pair) such as USD/CAD, USD/CHF and USD/JPY. This also does not appear to work when you select a specific liquidity provider (see following section). I only tested this with a single liquidity provider so I cannot be sure. It’s up to you to test it with you provider of choice.

Liquidity Providers

In the last section we saw how we tell eSignal which pair we want to look at. eSignal has price feeds from over 140 liquidity providers and the price you get is the consolidated price across all these providers. These providers include the big banks and several brokers. You can select to view the price from a specific provider by entering their contributor ID in the currency symbol. We choose a liquidity provider by flowing the currency symbol followed by ”@” then followed by the ID of the provider. For example, to get FXCM’s price (FXCM is one of the eSignal price contributors) of EUR/USD, you would enter the symbol as EUR@FXCM A0-FX. For EUR/JPY, the symbol would be EURJPY@FXCM A0-FX. I have two principal uses for using specific liquidity providers in my Acuity charts. The first is to use one with my tick charts, because the number of ticks for a specific provider is much smaller than the number of ticks in the entire market. My favorite provider for tick charts is TDFX (i.e. EUR@TDFX A0-FX). I use the overall market price for my minute based charts, so that I can compare the volume (using the Cumulative Tick) of the entire market vs a liquidity provider. The second use for specific providers is during news time, I will display the price from the overall market and several brokers and see if one of them is cheating by lagging their price. If they are I will trade that broker as their price eventually has to catch up to the rest of the market. If want to chart an exotic pair please note that you will not get any data on your chart if that pair is not carried by your selected provider. You can in this case use the overall market price or try using a different provider that deals in this pair.

There are over 160 forex liquidity providers listed on eSignal's website. I tested every single one with the EUR/USD and a few other common pairs. Only a small handful actually provided data to my charts which I list in the table below. There are a few possible reasons for this. One is that a few of them require a subscription (additional fee) to receive their data, mainly HotSptFX, symbols HOTS for retail subscribers and HSFX for professionals. Additionally the data from these two sources are not part of the composite pricing. Another reason is that some of these only provide data for very limited or specialized currencies, although I have no specific information.

Code Name Note

FXCM Forex Capital Markets, NYC Broker

FXDD FX Dealer Direct Broker

GAIN Gain Capital Inc. New York Broker

GFT Global Forex Trading, Michigan Broker

RF Rada forex, New York Broker – specializes in exotics

RTG Realtime Forex, Geneva Broker

TDFX 3DForex North America, Los Angeles Liquidity Provider

When charting gold (symbol XAU) and silver (symbol XAG), using a specific liquidity provider only seems to work on daily and larger timeframes (even when using a liquidity provider specializing in metals). When charting timeframes smaller than daily, use the composite price.

Spot and Forward Rate Codes

So far we’ve seen that we add an A0-FX at the end of a currency symbol to indicate that we want to chart a forex pair. A0-FX is only one of many options. A0 is the symbol for the spot rate and in the foreign exchange business there are more than spot rates. There are overnight rates (A1), next day rates (A2), 3 day rates (A3), one week rates (W1) and many more. All these codes are available on eSignal’s support site but for day to day forex trading you will not need them.

Precious Metals

If you get your eSignal for free from one of the forex brokers, you also get real-time precious metals prices (IN US Dollars). Here are the precious metals symbols which you can chart:

Gold XAUSilver XAGPlatinum XPTPalladium XPDGold/Silver Ratio AUG (listed but doesn’t seem to work)

The default for metals is to express the price in US Dollars, so for gold in US dollars we enter the symbol as XAU A0-FX, because these metals are treated as another currency. You can also chart these metals expressed in other currencies. For example, to chart the price of gold in British Pounds you enter XAUGBP A0-FX, for the price of silver in Japanese Yen you enter XAGJPY A0-FX.

Indices and Statistics

eSignal also includes some other freebies with your forex subscription. You get the major US stock indices and some real time statistics. To get any of these, you enter the prefix $ followed immediately by the index or stat symbol. For example, the real-time Dow Jones Index symbol is $INDU. Some of the other popular and useful indinces and statistics you may use in your trading are listed in the table below.

$TYX 30 year T-Bond Interest rates$INDU Dow Jones Industrial Average$TRAN Dow Jones Transportation Average$NDX NASDAQ 100$COMPQ NASDAQ Composite$RUT Russell 2000$SPX S&P 500$VIX CBOE Volatility Index$TICK NYSE Cumulative Tick$UVOL NYSE Up Volume$DVOL NYSE Down Volume$TVOL NYSE Total Volume$TICKQ NASDAQ Cumulative Tick$UVOLQ NASDAQ Up Volume$DVOLQ NASDAQ Down Volume

Other markets you can chart

Even if you’re only getting real-time forex data, you have at your disposal daily, weekly and monthly data for most other US markets. You can plug in these symbols in your Acuity charts the same way you use forex symbols. The difference is that you’re limited to daily, weekly or monthly bars. If you want intra-day or real-time data you will have to get a full eSignal subscription and pay the exchange fees for the markets you want to chart.

US Stocks

To chart a US stock, simply enter the stock symbol, with no prefix or suffix. For example, to chart Microsoft you simply enter the symbol MSFT (this may be due to eSignal’s legacy as a stock market data provider). This works for all US exchanges, even the OTCBB and Pink Sheets. No exchange suffix is required for these either.

Foreign Stocks

Unfortunately, you cannot chart stocks traded outside the US unless you get a full eSignal subscription and pay for the appropriate exchange fees. If you do, just note that each exchange has its own suffix code which must be added to the stock symbol. For example, to chart Bank of Montreal on the Toronto Stock Exchange, you would enter the symbol as BMO.TO. eSignal covers all the major exchanges in the world and the exchange codes can be found in their support page.

Futures

Just like stocks, you can also chart US traded futures with the same limitations. You are limited to daily and higher charts unless you pay for the full eSignal and pay the appropriate exchange fees. Before you proceed, you need to understand the naming conventions of futures contracts. A contract is identified by its symbol (usually two characters), a space, followed by its expiry month (see table below) then its expiry year. For example, the December 2008 Crude Oil contract is CL Z8. CL is the symbol for crude oil traded on NYMEX, Z is the code for December and 8 is for 2008, the year the contract expires (usually referred to as settlement date). The eSignal symbol is simply the futures contract symbol without any prefixes or suffixes.

Expiry MonthsJanuary FFebruary GMarch HApril JMay KJune MJuly NAugust QSeptember UOctober VNovember XDecember Z

You should be aware that most futures contract do not trade for every month. NYMEX Light Sweet Crude Oil (CL) is one that trades for every month (has a contract that settles every month). The stock index futures, such as the DOW (YM) and the S&P 500 (SPX) trade for March, June, September and December. There are countless futures contract traded across several exchanges and the specifications are listed on the website of the exchange where the contract is traded. Here are a few of the more popular futures contracts.

Product Symbol Exchange SettlementLight Sweet Crude Oil CL NYMEX All MonthsHenry Hub Natural Gas NG NYMEX All MonthsE-Mini DOW 30($5 / pt) YM CBOT H,M,U,ZE-Mini S&P 500 ($50 / pt) ES CME H,M,U,ZE-Mini NASDAQ 100 ($20 / pt) NQ CME H,M,U,ZE-Mini Russell 2000 ($100 / pt) TF ICE H,M,U,ZUS Dollar Index DX ICE Futures H,M,U,ZGold GC COMEX G,J,M,N,Q,V,ZSilver SI COMEX All MonthsCopper HG COMEX All MonthsCorn ZC CBOT F,H,K,N,Q,U,V,ZEthanol AC CBOT All MonthsSoybeans S CBOT F,H,K,N,Q,U,XEuro FX 6E CME H,M,U,Z

The above tables lists just a few of the hundreds of futures products available. I just went through a few of the US exchanges and didn't evn bother to look at other exchanges around the world. Some are based on actual commodities, some on wide ranging or narrow stock indexes, some on currencies (including exotic pairs) and some on events that don't have a direct financial outcome, such as weather. Think of a contractor in Northern US that gets paid by the amount of snow, shorting a snowfall futures to hedge the lack of snowfall, or a city hedging a large amount

of snow, or a county in Florida hedging against a hurricane. Other weather events such as rainfall and days of sunshine are all traded as futures contracts. But just because something is traded doesn't mean it's a good idea to trade them. Some of these products are designed mostly for larger enterprises and governments to hedge part of their business. Having said that, stock index futures, energy, precious metals and the common agriculture products are highly liquid and are considered tradeable by those having no involvement

Continuous Contracts

The nature of a futures contract is that it has an hard expiry date and date on which it begins to trade, but most of them do not trade heavily before they become the front month for that commodity. To allow us to perform analysis on large timeframes, eSignal has the concept of the continuous contract. This pieces together all the various expired contracts along with the current front month into a long running continuous chart. Even though there are slight differences in the same contract expiring on different months, these differences are small compared to the large swings that a commodity makes on weekly and monthly charts, making the continuous contract accurate enough to perform analysis. I do not know exactly what algorithm eSignal uses to piece together these different instruments into one that looks like a single one, but it does not matter. The important thing is that we can chart it and look at things like the price of oil going back to 1985. Not all instruments have been pieced this way but many have, especially the liquid ones.

Charting it is simple. Instead of selecting a specific month and year for the contract, simply replace that portion of the symbol by #F. For example, Crude Oil expiring in December 2008 is “CL Z8”, the continuous contract is “CL #F”.

Futures Exchanges

The futures markets are larger than the stock markets and what happens in them affects the other markets, so even if you don't trade them it can be helpful in knowing a bit more about them. Here are websites for some of the larger exchanges, and each one lists the instruments they trade and thew specs for each one (like CL is a contcact for delivery of 1000 barrels of Light Sweet Crude Oil).

Exchange Website Main products

Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) www.cbot.com DOW, many agricultural, Treasury Binds and Notes

Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) www.cme.com S&P, NASDAQ, Other stock indexes, Forex, cattle, Hogs, Eurodollar (not forex)

ICE Futures www.theice.com Russell Indexes, Cocoa, Cotton, Coffee. Sugar

Mew York mercantile Exchange (NYMEX)

www.nymex.com Energy, metals, coffee, cocoa, sugar

US Futures Exchange www.usfe.com DAX, Sensex, forex, narrow based stock indexes

One Chicago www.onechicago.com Single Stock Futures. These provide an alternative way to trade stocks with leverage comparable to CFD's but ina regulated market. See website for more details)

Eurex www.eurexexchange.com

European Stock Index futures, interest rate products

There are countless other exchanges covered by eSignal and I suspect that like stocks you can get free daily and higher charts on US exchanges but to get them on the international ones you need to subscribe to that particular exchange and pay the fees.

Additional Options

eSignal offers some additional options to their forex feed which you have to pay for. Some of these may have been mentioned elsewhere in the document but here I want to clarify which of these require additional monthly fees. GTIS is the base forex service which we all receive.

Description Non Pro Pro

HotSpot FX Retail $20.00 $20.00

HotSpot FX Institutional N/A $20.00*

GovPX US Benchmarks Treasurie s $25.00 $25.00

British Bankers Association (BBA) Libor Rates $10.00 $10.00

BGCantor Premium US Treasuries $198.00

BGCantorEye US Treasuries $60.00* Requires prior approval from HotSpotFX

Conclusion

This concludes my short overview of eSignal symbols and how to get a bit more out of Acuity and eSignal. I welcome your comments and suggestions for adding to or improving this document. You can reply in the forum or simply contact me through the fx-knight.com (username yrparent) community.