Introduction to Autochartist
Autochartist is a leading technical analysis service provider. The company offers a variety of services to cater to a variety of investment firms. Primarily the company scans multiple markets to look for patterns that could indicate trading opportunities or insights. The Autochartist service is watching markets across the world at all times. Coverage includes forex, crypto, metals, energy products, indices, stocks from a variety of exchanges, futures and perhaps even more.
The company is based in South Africa and has offices in London and Cyprus. Recently, Autochartist was integrated with cTrader on Web and Mobile versions of the platform. Presumably, Desktop is coming soon. This integration was part of a wider initiative undertaken by Spotware, whereby the firm went on a content integration spree to deliver as many insights as possible into the platform.
In this guide we explore how you can use the Autochartist integration with cTrader and what possibile benefits it can offer to you.
What does Autochartist Do?
The Autochartist service looks for a wide range of well-known chart patterns to identify shifts in the market. These patterns include support and resistance levels, Fibonacci patterns and other patterns such as Triangles, Head and Shoulders, Channels and many more.
Because of the extent of coverage, Autochartist is a great time saver for both trading firms, investment advisors, brokers and the average trader like you and I. As a trader you don’t need to review countless symbols and time frames to find your preferred patterns. Rather you can choose Autochartist to show you patterns that could inspire you with trading ideas.
Introduction to cTrader Integration with Autochartist
In recent months, cTrader has been on a spree of content integrations. Other popular content providers that have been drawn into the platform include economic calendar data from FX Street and competing technical analysis research company Trading Central. You may wonder why cTrader would integrate with two technical analysis research companies. Interestingly, cTrader has taken a different approach for integrating each company and Autochartist has become a more comprehensive feature in the cTrader platform.
How to Access Autochartist
Autochartist sells its service to brokers. Because of this, your broker will need to be subscribed to the services in order to pass access to clients. Many brokers offer this as an incentive for traders to sign up and trade with them.
cTrader Brokers Providing Autochartist. Sign up with these brokers to start using Autochartist technical analysis insights
How to Use Autochartist in cTrader
Providing you are trading with one of the aforementioned brokers that already offer both cTrader and Autochartist, then you should be able to access the services quite easily. cTrader has adopted a very unique approach, by natively integrating Autochartist data inside of the cTrader application. This direction has made the information easily accessible and more likely to be used by traders. Being overburdened by individual applications and tools is a common issue in today’s society.
Autochartist on cTrader Web
On the web version of cTrader, you will find a list of identified patterns located in the Active Symbol Panel in a tab called “Autochartist”. Following the logic of the Active Symbol Panel tool, the list will be filtered to show patterns from the currently selected symbol. The results for your active symbol can be filtered to select which type of patterns you want to be listed. Pattern type is the only filter option available. On the Autochartist web application, there are a number of filters that can be configured. This means you can be alerted about very specific events.
To get more details about a particular pattern, you just need to right-click once to open a frame with more information. This frame shows vital information to help determine whether to act on this idea or not.
In this dialogue, you can see the pattern name, chart interval, when the pattern was identified, the quality of the signal, which direction it is expected to move in and more. As well as viewing details, some actions can be taken as well. You can enter a position by setting the volume and clicking the button which corresponds to the direction of the idea. Also, you can conveniently launch this symbols chart to seek further confirmations based on this pattern.
Autochartist on cTrader Mobile
On the mobile version of cTrader, you can find a section called “Technical Analysis by Autochartist” inside the symbol overview page. This section shows all the patterns for the selected symbol. There is often more than one pattern recognized, therefore you can scroll through them using the left and right arrows.
How to Use Autochartist
In order to use this tool, some background information on technical analysis is required. Following trading ideas based on blind faith would not be a wise decision. The best way to use Autochartist is to be notified about specific patterns as they emerge. Some traders can spend hours watching multiple symbols on multiple time frames watching and waiting. Autochartist takes that burden away.
Besides supporting your trading decisions Autochartist can be valuable for learning to trade and getting a practical understanding of how chart patterns work.
Autochartist Information
As well as identifying patterns, Autochartist provides ratings and other important details to accompany each pattern. The provided details vary depending on the type of pattern, but in general, the details to pay attention to are quality and length. Quality is a 1 out of 10 rating, with 10 being the highest. Pattern length is the number of candles in the pattern, in general, the longer the length, the more defined the pattern is.
Autochartist Patterns
Autochartist scans for Support & Resistance levels as well as various chart patterns and fibonacci patterns.
Chart Patterns:
- Ascending & Descending Triangle
- Rising & Falling Wedge
- Channel Up and Channel Down
- Double Top & Double Bottom
- Head and Shoulder & Inverse Head and Shoulders
- Triangle
- Pennant
- Rectangle
- Flag
Fibonacci Patterns:
- ABCD
- 3 Drive
- Butterfly
- 3 Point Retracement
- 3 Point Extension
- Gartley
Is Autochartist Reliable?
Autochartist does reliably identify patterns. However, the main point to stress is that Autochartist does not advise you how to trade. The service scans the markets and identifies patterns for you to interpret. For a single symbol there can be a pattern that suggests an upward movement and at the same time suggests a downward movement, Autochartist will inform you about both.
One area component that improves Autochartist‘s reliability is that the service consumes market data from your broker and generates patterns of the exact same data you will be trading on. Some other services generate patterns based on generic data.
The company publishes statistics of its past performance. This is again based on each specific broker’s data. The results are shown on both an aggregate level and very granular level.
We’ve looked at Autochartist performance statistics on IC Markets. The report is for the period between the 9th of September 2019 and the 6th of March 2020 and states that Chart Patterns data was 66% accurate. It’s worth noting that Autochartist publishes a quality indicator with each identified pattern. The highest rated patterns were 89% accurate whereas the lowest rated were just 59% accurate. The idea is that all patterns are identified and rated, you can choose to follow through with a low quality pattern. Key Levels (support and resistance) performed better, these patterns were 78.5% accurate.
Other Autochartist Services
Autochartist offers its content as a service which comes packaged in a number of formats. One product is an API, this allows brokers and platforms to build their own integrations in their own style, much like the case of cTrader. Besides the integration with cTrader, there are other ways you can access Autochartist.
Autochartist offers a plug-in for MetaTrader 4. Unlike the case with cTrader, MT4 users need to install the official Autochartist expert advisor. While this step is likely to be inconvenient for some traders, the plugin offers quite an interesting feature. Identified chart patterns can be applied onto the platforms charts, which allows you to modify the chart objects freely. This approach contrasts significantly to cTrader, where a static image of a chart is shown.
As well as displaying patterns inside of trading platforms, the company offers its own web and mobile application for setting up filters and being alerted when new patterns are identified and meet your specific criteria. Autochartist also provides content for brokers to use in social media posts, in email correspondence and blog posts.
Conclusion of Autochartist Integration with cTrader
Autochartist is an incredibly valuable tool for traders who use chart patterns in their strategy. The service covers a lot of ground and can be a huge time saver. The integration is convenient and easy to access. However, the integration with cTrader is somewhat limited in scope. It lacks a number of filtering mechanisms and alerts when new patterns emerge. There is a lot of room for improvement which could come in the future. If you really want to take advantage of the Autochartist service, we suggest using their own web application, which is highly detailed but will take some getting used to.