Timothy Morge has been a professional trader, author, educator and mentor for more than 35 years.Besides trading his own capital, Tim is President of Blackthorne Capital, a private money management firm that works with several of the largest non-U.S. Institutional portfolios. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, he managed and taught other traders for institutions like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. He remains one of the world’s largest currency traders, routinely carrying positions of several billion U.S. Dollars. Read More
Ensign Windows Tips
Display a Bar Counter Did you know you can display how much time or how many ticks are left on a price bar before the next bar is formed. First, make sure the Bar Data Panel is displayed on your chart. Two ways to do this: 1. Ctrl-P will display the Chart Properties box where you can hide or show the Bar Data Panel. 2. Ctrl-B toggles the display for the Bar Data Panel without having to open Chart Properties. 
Now, define what data items you want displayed. Right-click anywhere inside the Bar Data Panel to display a drop down list of items you can select to show or hide. This is the Bar Data Panel on my charts. It displays using shortlabels ('H' instead of 'High') and a watch icon next to Time Left counter. In this example, there are 14:26 minutes left in the current 20 minute price bar. Volume and tick count is also displayed but not useful to me since I use 20 minute price bars. 
Super Quick Tips, Part II Thanks to Paul C and Bob O for these great quick tips. 1. Drawing Vertical Lines Select the Line drawing tool and hold down the Shift key and drag your mouse to draw the vertical line. Important to note – If your Default setting for lines has the Horizontal option checked this will not work. 2. Hiding the Ticker in the Toolbar and the Price/Time Axis To hide the price/time axis click Ctrl-Alt-T keys. To show, use the same keystroke combination. To hide the ticker follow these steps: a) Open the Setup | Charts window and click the Data Panels tab b) If not already selected, select the Chart Caption option button. c) Deselect Symbol from the Visible Fields list d) You may need to close and restart Ensign for this to work 3. Changing colors When changing colors for drawing tools (lines, forks, etc) try double clicking the color instead for clicking the color and clicking the OK button.
More Bar-by-Bar Tips Now that Tim has been making bar-by-bar chart analyzes a part of some of the Premium Members Mini-Mentoring Sessions let's look at simple ways to control the movement of the chart across the screen.
or the Equal sign key ('=') on the keyboard will return the chart to it's default scale settings. Scale controls the price and date interval settings defined in the Chart Properties.Shift-Equal or Shift- will jump to the first bar on the chart or Equal key will jump to the last bar on the chart
Making the Close Element of a Bar Stand Out
and Parallel lines 
. An ellipse created from parallel lines is more flexible in terms of changing it's position on the chart and tilting it on it's side but both are tricky to work with. Let's step through it:
Lesson 1 – Swing High, Swing Low I'm starting a new series within Ensign charting tips. For those of you that have Premium subscriptions you're familiar with Tim's on-line trading lessons. For each of Tim's lessons I will post a tip that I hope will help you while practicing the techniques within that lesson. For those that do not have a Premium subscription, the tip presented will still give you helpful advice. Marking out the swing high and swing low lines can be simple, at least from an Ensign drawing standpoint. We touched on the features Ensign provides for drawing lines in the Super Lines and Mouse Wheel Magic. Let's apply what we learned from these tips to simplifying the creation of swing high, swing low lines. Create two new lines and assign them to empty slots. I had blank slots at 8 and 9 so 8 became my swing high line and 9 stored my swing low. Here's what my swing high line property window looks like:
Swing low uses a different color (red), has an 'SL' label, Horizontal property is checked (not shown here) and is stored at 9. Now drawing swing high and swing low lines are quick and easy. I draw the line and click either 8 or 9 (or use the mouse wheel). Depending on whether you draw the line from left to right or right to left the Custom Label text will appear either on the left or right side of the line. This is a neat trick as it allows you to control where the label appears without adjusting the location on the Draw Line properties window. 
Good luck with Lesson 1 and remember to practice, practice, practice.
Super Quick Tips, Part I Here's the first part of what I intend to be a listing of super quick tips. Super Quick Tips are tips that can be described with just a sentence or two of explanation so we have four tips outlined here. 1. Get rid of all these drawings! Delete all lines, shapes, notes on your chart by right mouse click anywhere in the background of the chart and select Delete -> All Draw Tools.
. Most recently drawn objects appear at the end of the list; older objects closer to the top. 
3. Share your workspace with others As an Ensign Windows user you can share your Workspaces with other Ensign Windows users. All your Workspaces are separate files stored in the /ENSIGN/Workspace folder. 
Quick and Easy Chart Time Period Changes Have you ever wanted to take a quick look at a different time frame for a contract but not want to go through the clicks to create a new chart? Here's a way to do this without creating new charts and cluttering up your workspace. The Times button, appropriately represented with a clock icon
, opens the Times Panel window. 
Select a different time period and your chart will change to reflect that new time (or range, volume, tick, etc) period. This Time Panel is customizable by selecting the Edit button and typing whatever time period you need. One advantage to this method is if you have marked up your chart with median lines, fib retracement markers, sliding parallels, etc before changing the time period you will not lose any of these markings when you decide to go back to the original time frame.
Elusive Circles Defeated Circles are handy illustrative drawing tools but are a pain to grab and move or resize. Thanks to a tip from Shabir this elusive object has been tamed. Permanently. Click on the Circle draw tool
and draw out a circle on your chart. Open the Circle property window and make these changes:
Check the Use as Default checkbox and your "I can't grab this circle" problems are over.
Mouse wheel magic This is the number 1 submitted Ensign Windows tip. Thanks to all who sent this one in. It is a good one! This trick applies to any of these drawing tools.
For example, let's look at Draw Line and see what we can set: Default – green and horizontal (1) – blue with a Custom Label "BOT" and Left Side label $ (2) – red with a Custom Label "stop loss" (3) – pink and not horizontal etc… When you draw a line on your chart you can change the format by using your mouse wheel or the 1,2,3 keys on your keyboard.
Chart Teasers: Exposing a Chart Bar-by-Bar Ever need to expose a chart one bar at a time? Thanks to for Roger Wolf for this great tip. The key to making this work lies with your keyboard shortcut settings for charts. Open the Set-Up | Charts windows and select the Keyboard tab.
You can control how many bars are exposed at a time and use the Right and Left keyboard keys to shift the chart. You can also control where on the screen the 'current bar' is exposed by adjusting the Right Margin in pixels setting on the Chart Properties window.
Peace of Mind When Saving Workspace Changes Has this ever happened to you? You've busy drawing median lines and mapping out market structure on several of your currency charts when you click over to another chart to check on crude oil in your commodities Workspace. When you click back to currencies you can't find any of your changes because you forgot to save them. Any changes you make to charts within a Workspace have to be saved if you want to preserve the changes before you move to another Workspace or shut down Ensign Windows. Here's how you can delegate that task to Ensign Windows: Open a listing of your Workspaces by selecting File | Workspaces or clicking the Workspace toolbar button
There are three options that control saving Workspace changes: Manual, Prompt or Automatic (see yellow highlighted section). 
The Save option you select will apply to all Workspaces.
Notes with a little more emphasis Have you ever wanted to draw attention to a very specific place on your chart? There are a couple of tools Ensign Windows provides to do just that.The Direct Note toolbar button
lets you add text inside an arrow. 
The Marker toolbar button 
lets you add custom or predefined notes above, below, left and/or right of an arrow. 
These are both simple examples of what these tools can do. Play around them to learn more.
Save Yourself Trips to the Toolbar Have you ever wanted to draw a lazy-Z line pattern onto your chart without having to repeatedly click the Line drawing tool button? Paul McManus has a solution for you. Drawing a lazy-Z or a V shape requires you to draw multiple lines and connect them into the shape you need. Here's how you draw these lines without having to click the Line toolbar button multiple times.Before drawing your first line, click the Auto Repeat Button
Once activated, the button will change 
to indicate it is in Auto Repeat mode. Click the Line toolbar button and you can now draw as many lines as you need without having to click the Line toolbar button again. To deactivate Auto Repeat click the Auto Repeat Button. The Auto Repeat function works with any of the drawing tools. You can do the same for any of the drawing tools including Median Lines. Set Default to be red, (1) to be green and uses Modified Schiff, etc. You get the idea. It takes a little time investment up front to setup the multiple formats for each of the drawing tools you use but it will pay off with less clicks and trips to the toolbar! 
