Why I Decided to Develop Custom Studies for Sierra Chart

Greetings! My name is Cesar Varela. And I have a passion for coding and trading.

With over two decades of experience in software development, I've worked on numerous projects ranging from desktop applications to mobile games. However. My interest in financial markets led me down the path of trading.

As I delved deeper into the world of trading, I became intrigued by its inner workings; Where was it hosted? Which data structure do they use? Bandwidth? Latency? What lies behind the charts? And that's when I discovered the price ladder or DOM. The backbone of market transactions. Price doesn't move diagonally, it moves up or down. It was like uncovering the secrets behind a magic show.

While exploring different trading methods and courses I came across Jigsaw Trading, and the concept of Scalping, which (as you probably now) consists of trading directly on the DOM. At the same time I saw that every trader that I considered a serious trader was using Sierra Chart in one way or another. So I decided to get both, on one hand Sierra looks like it got stuck in the 90's and on the other Jigsaw is a very buggy platfom, with very odd UX/UI decisions.

This sparked an idea in my mind: what if I could bring Jigsaw's user experience to Sierra? Thus began my journey of dedicating countless hours studying Sierra Charts custom studies and ACSIL documentation.

I faced numerous obstacles and challenges along because of the way Sierra Chart uses looping and how it handles mouse events. Because it uses the old Windows GDI api to draw stuff, and because it had been years since I've writen anything in C++!

But in the end all the features that interested me are working: one click orders to price, "Momentum Tails" that animate properly, a volume profile that displays at the right of the DOM, etc.

This study took hours upon hours to develop so I cannot give it away free especially considering that now that I got here I want to do more, like voice alerts that don't sound like robots, quality of life studies, like a better clock, better text tools, etc., and specially a platform to track trades that takes journaling to the next level, building upon LLMs like chatGPT.

I've been using these studies for months now, and they seem stable, but still need more testing so I'm open to share some free licences to anyone that's open test them on their machines and repor any bugs or feedback.

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New all time high of the day to you, Cesar