Scanning for Inside bars with Hammer Pro

In Hammer Pro you can build your own market scanner on the basis of different criteria, according to your preference and the needs of your own trading system. In this article we will show you an example of a built-in scanner in Hammer Pro, how to set it up and how you can use it.

First you need to open a new Watch list. You can do it from your Dashboard.

The following window will appear:

Fill it up with your selection of stock symbols that you want the scanner to go through. You can do that by going to Main → Symbols and type them in or paste the whole list.

When you have your list of stocks ready, go and choose your preferred Scanner.

On the right side you have a few options for every scanner that you use. You can choose between Intraday and Historical data. When you’ve chosen Intraday, you can select if any of the Extended Hours of market data should be taken into consideration while the scanner is working. For our example, let’s select Never. This way our scanner will work only based on data gathered from the Market open to the Market close.

If we choose Historical it simply means that we would be scanning for time frames from Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly.
The other selectable option is the Frequency of the time frame. For the Intraday mode it is any of the built-in time frames from 60 minutes and below, as well as custom ones of your preference.

Now that we have our work on the right side of the board done, we continue with the setting up of our scanner on the left side. We go to Params and set the parameters for this individual scanner.

This particular scanner is based on Candlestick patterns. We are going to check “Inside” and our scanner is going to search for Inside bars. The logic behind and Inside bar candlestick pattern is simple and widely used by traders. It compares two candles in the following way:

High of Candle2 is lower than or equal to High of Candle1
and
Low of Candle2 is higher than the Low of Candle1
OR
High of Candle2 is lower than the High of Candle1
and
Low of Candle2 is higher than or equal to Low of Candle1

We choose our preferred color and click OK.

Notice how we have Auto-Backfill checked and the Filter button “on” as well. When we have our scanner set up like this, it gives is the following overall result:

All the symbols, out of our chosen list of stocks, that have the above mentioned candlestick pattern logic(Inside bar) being true for the selected time frame(5 minutes, for Market hours only) are shown in the Watch List window and marked with “Inside” and our chosen color in the Column Scanner results.

If we have the Filter button function stopped, we are going to see all of the symbols in our Watch list and not just the results from the scanner. It is going to look like this.

This way, if you have other patterns checked in the Params section, you can see all the results in one window.

Or you can simply arrange the symbol list by the Scan result column if you have other columns that you’re using at the same time.

Another useful function, complimentary to the Scanner, is the Candlestick pattern detection on the Chart. Here we have the same Inside bar pattern shown on our SPY chart. It is marked with a “1” above the candlestick which it represents.

You can use it by adding an indicator on the chart by right clicking on it.

After that you have to choose Paintbar from the list of indicators and drag and drop it to the right side where “Selected Indicators” are to be shown. You finalize it by clicking Ok.

You can also choose how and where the symbol for the pattern should appear on the chart, as well as the text format. That happens by accessing the Indicator Edit button on the upper left on a chart.

This is just one example of the built-in scanners and indicators that Hammer Pro has in its arsenal. Play around with it and you will find many other useful functions.