Angle in degrees

 

How do you measure the angle in degrees from the last bar's close to the close n bars ago? And no, the angle does not change if you zoom out, because zooming out does not mean changing the length of a unit, it only changes the perspective, it's like when you draw a triangle on a sheet of paper and then slowly walk away from it: do its corners change? Not with my paper... If you press F8 in your MT4, there's a feature called "scale fix one to one". This means that 1 unit on the horizontal axis has the same length as 1 unit on the vertical axis. Can anybody please help me? Thank you.

 
MrH:

How do you measure the angle in degrees from the last bar's close to the close n bars ago? And no, the angle does not change if you zoom out, because zooming out does not mean changing the length of a unit, it only changes the perspective, it's like when you draw a triangle on a sheet of paper and then slowly walk away from it: do its corners change? Not with my paper... If you press F8 in your MT4, there's a feature called "scale fix one to one". This means that 1 unit on the horizontal axis has the same length as 1 unit on the vertical axis. Can anybody please help me? Thank you.

You can't . . . an angle is meaningless. If you want to measure it then measure/calculate the slope/rate of change and then you don't need to try and constrain the scales on your chart..
 

A sheet of paper is length x and length y, same units, different direction.

A chart is bars or time x, price y. angle is meaningless. What is the angle of a car moving 60 miles in one hour?

 
I found this in the code base - it may be of interest
 

Apparently I'm not the first person to struggle with this.

@ Ickyrus: thanks

@ WHRoeder: Say you're only interested in close prices, and you look at the line graph, (Alt-3). So if you check the box scale fix one to one, and then you measure the slope, then with a bit of trig you would get the angle? So instead of working with pips and bars, you only work with 1 unit: pixels. Then why do you say it would be meaningless? It doesn't matter what the aspect ratio of your monitor is, or what the physical size of 1 pixel is (I don't know if that standardized or not). The unit, pixels, would be the same, right?

"Scale fix One to One — fix the chart scale as "one to one" (the size of one pip of the vertical axis in pixels is equal to the distance between the bars axes in pixels). At that, the "Scale fix" option will be enabled automatically, and a scroll bar will appear at the right side of the window that allows to move the chart vertically. This mode is necessary for precise constructions."

Something else is the Crosshair, if you enable it, then go stand on a bar and you drag it (left mouse button and don't release), 3 numbers appear: ../../...., the first one the number of bars from the initial point where you clicked, the second one some measure of vertical movement (not pips), is this pixels, because its values don't change as you zoom in or out? and the third one the value of price on the Y axis.

@ RaptorUK: "an angle is meaningless. If you want to measure it then measure/calculate the slope/rate of change and then you don't need to try and constrain the scales on your chart"

the slope m of the line is m = (y2-y1)/(x2-x1)

the grade m of a road is related to its angle of incline θ by m = tan( θ ) (wikipedia)

Or the other way around, arctan (slope) = angle, in degrees. Angle and slope are easily convertible. If angle is meaningless, then why would have slope have meaning if 1 vertical unit is not equal to 1 horizontal unit?

Thank you all for the feedback!

 
MrH:

@ RaptorUK: "an angle is meaningless. If you want to measure it then measure/calculate the slope/rate of change and then you don't need to try and constrain the scales on your chart"

the slope m of the line is m = (y2-y1)/(x2-x1)

the grade m of a road is related to its angle of incline θ by m = tan( θ ) (wikipedia)

Or the other way around, arctan (slope) = angle, in degrees. Angle and slope are easily convertible. If angle is meaningless, then why would have slope have meaning if 1 vertical unit is not equal to 1 horizontal unit?

Thank you all for the feedback!

An angle only makes sense when the lines that make the angle can be measure in the same unit. A rate of change can have it's unit defined in 2 other units, for example velocity m/s. What you are trying to do is the same as measuring velocity as an angle . . . why ?
 
RaptorUK:
An angle only makes sense when the lines that make the angle can be measure in the same unit. A rate of change can have it's unit defined in 2 other units, for example velocity m/s. What you are trying to do is the same as measuring velocity as an angle . . . why ?

Angle and slope is essentially the same thing. They are exchangeable. This means that you could express i.e. miles/hour as a slope also. It wouldn't make much sense to most of us, but mathematically it's the same. Just like you could also express a slope in percentages: when they talk about a mountain that the athletes in cycling races have to cross, like in the Tour de France: they express the rate of incline in percentage. This is a slope, expressed as an angle.

 
As a side note on pixels & monitors: a pixel is not a physical unit of the screen: the amount of pixels can be adjusted, this is the resolution: higher resolution means larger number of pixels in the same amount of space (i.e. a 23 inch monitor). So only if your resolution is the same, will the number of pixels be the same, and the distances of the Scale One to One charts will be identical! If you don't believe me, just take a screenshot of your One to One chart on 2 monitors with different resolutions, paste 1 screenshot in Microsoft Paint or whatever graphics software you're using, and then paste the other one exactly on top of the first one (in transparent mode). You will see that the lines are not equal.
 
MrH:

Angle and slope is essentially the same thing. They are exchangeable. This means that you could express i.e. miles/hour as a slope also. It wouldn't make much sense to most of us, but mathematically it's the same. Just like you could also express a slope in percentages: when they talk about a mountain that the athletes in cycling races have to cross, like in the Tour de France: they express the rate of incline in percentage. This is a slope, expressed as an angle.

Angle and slope are only interchangeable if the units on X and Y are the same. Velocity can indeed be expressed as a slope, that is what I said . . . rate of change is the same as slope or gradient.

OK, so you say that angle and slope are exchangeable and that velocity can be expressed as a slope and therefore as an angle . . . . ok, so what angle is 30 mph ?
 
MrH:
As a side note on pixels & monitors: a pixel is not a physical unit of the screen: the amount of pixels can be adjusted, this is the resolution: higher resolution means larger number of pixels in the same amount of space (i.e. a 23 inch monitor). So only if your resolution is the same, will the number of pixels be the same, and the distances of the Scale One to One charts will be identical! If you don't believe me, just take a screenshot of your One to One chart on 2 monitors with different resolutions, paste 1 screenshot in Microsoft Paint or whatever graphics software you're using, and then paste the other one exactly on top of the first one (in transparent mode). You will see that the lines are not equal.

Actually a pixel is a physical unit of the screen when talking LCD screens. It is a very bad idea to run an LCD screen at anything lower than it's native resolution because the image will be less clear.

Taking a screen shot is not the same as what you see . . . what is the aspect ratio of the pixels in your screen ?

 
RaptorUK:
ok, so what angle is 30 mph ?

30 miles for 1 hour = a right triangle with right sides 1and 30, and hypotenuse (30^2+1^2)^0.5 = 30.0166. The slope here would be from point (0,0) to point (1,30), so the slope is 30/1. Using the Angle = arctan(slope) formula, arctan (30)= 1.537475 (radians). Degrees=(radians*180)/pi, so the angle is 88 degrees. You could also use trigonometric rules in this triangle to find the angle. So the 30 miles/hour expressed in angle is 88°. Off course that doesn't make any sense to you and me, but mathematically it does, unless you disagree with trigonometry, but that's probably not the case. So what if miles is a measure of distance and hours is a measure of time, or pips is a measure of distance and bars is a measure of time, that's the point of slope: to compare 2 things. The neat thing about One to One scaling is that these measurements will have the same unit, 1 pixel. So you can use this rule. Now my question is, how do you measure pixels in MT4.

aspect ratio is 1680x1050, PnP monitor