How to use TIME & DATE functions in PINE SCRIPT V4 • Session Volatility Indicator 📉

hey traders today i thought i'd do
something a little bit different and i'm
going to show you
a script that i recently wrote i'm going
to break down the source code
show you guys how to use the time and
date functions
in your scripts
i was going to wrap up my order view
series this week but i just haven't had
the time to record that lesson
yet so that will be next week instead
i've been extremely busy this week with
my own trading
in the forex and crypto markets and
running the pine script mastery birthday
discount
if you're interested in any of my
courses now is a great time to pick them
up because i have a 25
off discount going to the end of the
week but i don't want to hop on about
that any longer let's get into today's
lesson where i'm going to break down
this new script i've just created this
week
called my session volatility indicator
or calculator so this is a lesson taken
from my indicators and
strategies course where i break down the
source code to every script i've ever
written and because this
is a short script but an interesting
script covering a couple of features i
haven't covered on my youtube channel
before i thought it's a great
opportunity to
show you these features this is an open
source script i don't release all of my
scripts open source because a lot of
them are quite valuable and take a long
time to make but this one didn't take
very long at all so i just released it
as an open source
script so i'll leave a link in the video
description to the source code for this
script over
at tradingview anyway let's get into
today's lesson
this script is a session volatility
calculator so what it's doing is it is
scanning through all the price action on
my chart between two specific dates
and a certain time of day it's then
measuring
the highest price during that certain
time of day and the lowest price
to get the range of that session and
then it's adding up all of those
sessions
to give us an average and this is the
average range of the trading session
that we have specified in the settings
menu so let's jump over into the pine
editor and i'll break down the source
code to this script
so here we are in the pine editor um the
first thing i do
as always is get my user input quite
simple here we're just getting four
inputs which will be easier to
demonstrate if i open up the
uh settings menu so we have our start
date our end date so this is the range
that we want to the date range that we
want to calculate the average
session size during and the time session
to analyze is where we specify
the time of day so this
last setting here this color background
changes the background color of our
chart
if the price action printing onto our
chart falls within
this time session and within these dates
so you can see i've set the dates here
to the first of june which was a couple
of days ago as of recording this video
the end date is 2099 so like 70 years
from now
by default this is set to the year 1000
and this is set to 2099 and that just
makes sure that all the price action on
our chart
is taken into consideration at least
until the year 2099 and then
if i'm still alive then i can update
this to the year
3099 but by then i'll probably be a
cyborg and the markets will be run by
artificial intelligence and none of this
will
be useful anyway so let me increase the
resolution of my screen
and we'll go through the source code
here line by line
most of it should look familiar to you
if you've gone through any of my other
indicator lessons some of this stuff is
just directly copy and pasted
from other scripts that i've written all
right so that was our user inputs
the first thing i do after getting my
inputs is
define a custom function that converts
4x pips into whole numbers so this is
only for the forex markets
if you load this script onto any other
market this
function basically doesn't do anything
but if you load it
onto a forex market and the atr the
average
true range is less than one or less than
a whole number
then this little bit of code here will
convert your number in pips
into whole numbers so you can see up
here that the
box here says 22.875
if i were to not use this function this
would say
0.00022
and so to make it more useful i convert
that into a whole number
but if i load something like a crypto
chart on my screen let's load up bitcoin
um this just changes to price change and
it's cut off on my screen here because i
have my resolution turn right up but if
you had this on a normal resolution this
would
say price change instead of pips so you
can see here that
during the time i've highlighted on my
chart at least
on these two days the average move for
bitcoin was
and seventy 1176 dollars i probably
should have mentioned this at the start
of the video but the purpose of this
script
the reason i developed the script was to
help me calculate
engage session volatility which can help
with things like target placement
in day trading strategies and just
getting a general idea of how much
markets move
during certain times of day so for
example i could set this
setting this time session to
9 a.m my time here in australia to let's
say
10 pm my time which might be
the active trading time that i have to
trade the markets i could see how much
movement happens during that time
compared to when i'm asleep or i can
check
what the average move is on aussie yen
during the asian market
so between 9am and 4pm
my time and i can see if it's worth
developing day trading strategies on
those pairs
based on how much they tend to move
because if a market doesn't move much
during a certain time of day then it's
completely pointless trying to trade
a 15-minute chart or five-minute chart
strategy anyway this is a coding lesson
not a trading lesson so let's move on to
the next
part of my code here which is this
function
in session which just returns whether or
not
the current bar falls within the
specified time period
and the specified time of day so this
function
appears in a lot of my scripts are
basically what this n a
check does is it checks whatever value i
pass into this function
to see if it's n a n or not a number if
it's not a valid number
then it returns true if it is a valid
number then it returns false
and then this time function checks to
see if the current bar falls within the
time session we give it
and if it doesn't then this time
function returns n a
and so our n a function will return true
and this check here will
fail i could have also written here not
n a
and gotten rid of that if i wanted to
but i'll leave it as it is
and basically this check here will fail
this whole function
this function returns a boolean value by
the way it returns true or false
and so yeah if the current bar does not
fall within
the session was specified then in
session returns false
i added on this colon one two three four
five six
seven on the end of our time session
here because
for some reason if you don't do this
this is how many days of the week
to include in this check if you don't do
this then for some reason on weekends
the script doesn't include weekend days
in the uh time function check i'm not
sure why maybe they've changed that i
haven't checked if they've fixed this
but maybe it's intended to be that way
but basically this is for crypto markets
because crypto markets
obviously trade over the weekends and so
i had to add on uh
which days of the week to check by
adding on this string here and just a
side note
worth mentioning is if you wanted to
check just how
a market performed on a monday you could
get rid of these and then it's only
going to check
on the monday or on a weekend you could
just have six and seven
i believe that works i haven't actually
tested that but if i recall correctly
from
when i was studying the documentation
that's how this parameter works
so that's something you might want to
play around with if you're interested in
this sort of thing and then of course
next we check if the current bar's time
falls within our start date and our
end date then we change the background
color
if the user has turned color bg on in
the settings menu
and the current bar falls within our
given time session
then the color of the chart changes to
blue with 90
transparency so rgb is red green blue
255 is maximum amount of blue and 90
here is our transparency setting and
otherwise
if these two booleans do not pass they
both return false or one of them returns
false
then we just change the background color
to n a or nothing
let me leave it as it is next up we
count how many bars are loaded onto the
current
chart and i'm not sure why we do this
because i don't use this information
anywhere else in the script so i'm just
going to remove that
and we'll move on that must have been
from when i was testing something
while developing the script so let's
move on to the next block of code which
checks if a new session has begun so we
create a var variable
this is used later on in the script is
like a flag
so that the script knows that we are
currently within the given session
and we want to save or store relevant
data
from that session so if in session is
true
and we were not in session in the
previous bar
then that means we've crossed into our
session and we set within session to
true
so again that might be confusing but
what what is happening here
is this bar here was not within our
session
but this bar was the script has detected
that the previous bar was not in session
but this bar was
and so we know that this is the
beginning of our time session
and then we can do the same for the
ending of our time session
where we check if a session is ended so
for this check we check
are we no longer within our time session
and
were we in our time session on the
previous bar that means we have
exited our time session
and we want to perform the calculation
for this relevant
uh time of day so the next thing we do
is declare a bunch of required variables
for
our analysis the first one uh these are
all var variables because we want these
saved across all the bars on our chart
the first variable is our recent
movement this is
the recent movement of the current
session so if i hover my mouse
over here you can see these numbers up
here
the purple number is the current
sessions range
and the orange number is this number
divided by
the average so it's basically a
percentage of
the average if i hover over here you can
see that this purple number
says 17.8 that's because we had a
17.7 and it's rounding up to 17.8 so we
had a 17.7 pip
range from this high down to this low
this was 17 pips
that is stored here in the recent
movement variable then we have our total
movement variable
this adds up all of the movement from
all of these sessions on our chart
and saves it so that later on we can
divide it by how many sessions we
counted in order to get the average
so next up we have our sessions counted
this adds up how many sessions we have
analyzed
we need this number in order to
determine the average then we have
max int i just added this variable uh
for our lowest low
so every time we reset for the next
session we set our lowest low to this
large number and the reason for doing
this is that
as soon as we start scanning a new
session
the lowest low is always going to be
less than this number
unless the price of the asset we're
analyzing
is above this number and i don't know of
any markets that have a price
larger than this number maybe there are
some out there but for the most part
this should work
on all the markets on our chart same for
highest high that's just set to a
negative number because
every time we start analyzing a new
session the first bar's high
is of course going to be higher than
negative one and this ensures
that in this example for example uh the
first bar
of the range was the highest bar in the
session
so when we begin saving our highest high
and lowest low of the current session in
this
block of code here our high is of course
going to be higher than negative one
which is the default setting for this
variable
and so no matter what the first bar of
the session will be assigned highest
high
and if any other bars in the session are
higher than this bar then this will be
overwritten
with the high of that bar and lowest low
is initialized as our max
integer value all right so this is where
most of the
sort of the bulk of the script occurs
the analysis that the script does
so the first thing we do is we check if
the session has ended so
again is the current bar out of our
session and was the previous bar within
the session
then we've exited our session or the
session has ended
so we set within session to false so
that this code no longer executes
and we analyze the movement of the
recent session so recent movement is
assigned to the highest high
of that session minus the lowest low the
total movement
is incremented by the recent movement so
this just adds
up all of these session sizes across our
entire chart
and then we divide that number by how
many sessions we analyze in order to get
the
average then we increment sessions
counted by one
so every time we analyze a new session
our sessions counter
increases and then we reset our stored
high and low for the next session so
that when the next session begins
these numbers get overwritten as soon as
price is being analyzed so once this
session ends
they are both overridden with
their default values so the highest high
goes to negative one the lowest low goes
to a large number
the next block of code here simply gets
the highest high and lowest low of the
current session so if we are within
the time period we want to analyze and
the current bar's high is greater than
our saved highest high
then we want to overwrite that highest
high with the current bar's high
same with the low then once we've done
all that we can calculate the average
pip movement over all analyzed sessions
so to do that we just divide the total
movement
by how many sessions we counted that
gives us the average
and then we can plot all that data to
the chart so we plot our
volatility info if we are within a
session
then we plot our highest high and our
lowest low and if we are not within the
session
then we plot our recent movement and our
recent movement divided by the average
movement so that's the purple and orange
number up here
so you can see this is the very first
session that we have counted on our
chart or analyzed on our chart
and so 17.8 divided by 17.8
is one so this was 100 of the average
and then our second session was 122
of the average but we're only analyzing
two sessions here just for demonstration
purposes
if i were to set this to let's say 2001
and click ok now the script is analyzing
every session on my
chart and you can see that the average
pit movement is 32.9
and so our orange percentage number
changes here so this session
was 80 of the average this session was
50
of the average so this was a quiet
session compared to the average
and then finally we make use of a brand
new feature
two-part script the team added very
recently and that is
tables so here we are creating an output
table to display
the average pip change and i'll leave a
link below this video
to the blog post that explains this
latest update
basically what we're doing is creating a
new table
we want the position to be in the top
right of our chart then we specify
our columns and rows i copy and pasted
this code
from the blog post and i haven't changed
these but i'm pretty sure we could set
these to one and one since i've only got
one
column and one row there but i'll leave
it as it is for now then our border
width
is set to three then we have a custom
function here that fills
the cell of our table we specify the
table we want to fill
the column the row the value
and then some text to add on to the
value
so all of this information is inputted
into the table.cell function
which fills this cell of the given table
with a given column number in the given
row
with our cell text and our cell text is
just converting
our value to string and then making sure
that we cap the decimal places at one
two three four five decimals then we add
on a new line
and our description text so that's how
we get
the pip change text below the number or
the value then we fill in all the other
information here the background color
which is just color.green
and transparency which is 80 and the
text color
is the same as the background color and
the width
of this cell is six now i think if i
remove this
then the cell should
change based on the text size
dynamically
that's much better and we only fill our
cell
on the very last bar that is loaded onto
our chart
this is for optimization purposes if we
don't do this
nothing changes except that our cell is
filled
on every historical bar on our chart and
this
number is basically overwritten every
time a new bar
is loaded onto the chart but we don't
want that we only want this information
to print to the chart
on the very last bar of our chart and
this is where we use our fill
cell function to put in our average
movement
as a whole number and then we check if
the symbol info
the market type of the current symbol is
4x if it is 4x then the text
we add on to our value is pip change
otherwise it's just
price change and that's it it's actually
a pretty simple script
the concept at least is quite simple but
hopefully you found that interesting
and maybe you can think of other use
cases for this approach
for example i would like to play around
with a relative volume
indicator that uses this approach i
already have a few
relative volume scripts that i've
written but i think comparing the
relative volume
to the average based on time here the
same way we've done here with price
i think that would be an interesting
concept to explore but anyway i'll leave
it there
thanks for watching and good luck with
your coding take care
all right thanks for watching everyone i
hope you found this lesson interesting
if you did make sure to hit the
subscribe button if you haven't already
because i will be back very
soon next week in fact with a new pine
script video
next week's lesson is going to cover how
to set up a virtual private server
so that you can run auto view 24 7 on a
remote server
so you don't need to leave your home
computer running in case your girlfriend
or your wife
doesn't like the sound of that or in
case your power bill is a little too
high and that will be the final video in
my auto view series and then we'll move
on to other topics
including a expert advisor that was
brought to my attention recently
it's a script that runs in metatrader
that can
read or receive your trading view alerts
and
execute trading commands based on those
alerts through metatrader which is
pretty powerful stuff
and i'm really excited to explore that
tool oh and by the way if you're
watching this video after this
promotions ended
there is also the coupon code youtube
which will get you 10 off all of my
courses
it's not as good as 25 but hey i can't
give discounts out all the time
i already think i've priced my courses
at a pretty fair value
so that'll do it for today thanks for
watching everyone i appreciate your
support
for the channel have a great weekend and
best of luck with your trading
as always take care