The Battle Station Chart Setup – Getting Started (Newbies must read)

When you first load the Battle Station, the input options may look intimidating.

You don’t need to worry too much about them to get started, as they are all set to a good default operating setting. 90% of the time, I am using the default settings, as are most other traders.

But throughout this entire guide, you will learn about tweaking the different options.

There may be situations where you need to change some settings, to get the Battle Station to perform more specific tasks for you, and I’ve tried to make each aspect of the Battle Station as customization as possible.

In this chapter, I am going to walk you through:

• Getting the Battle Station on your chart
• Configuring it the way you want
• Saving the template so you only have to do it once

Loading the Battle Station Onto Your Chart

If you installed the Battle Station correctly, you should see it in your indicators list.

Depending on how you installed it, it might be in the root directory or in a  ‘The Forex Guy Tools’ folder (which is how I set up the file structure by default now)

Above: How to load the Battle Station onto a chart

When you double click, or click-and-drag the Battle Station on the chart – it will give you an ‘input options’ screen before it actually loads.

We need to do two things as a minimum to get a successful load:

1. Make sure .dll files are enabled
2. Input your War Room login and password

To make sure .dll file cells are enabled, select the common tab:

Then enter your War Room username and password

Press OK, you should see the Battle Station has loaded on your chart by displaying some information in the top left corner of the screen:

Customizing The Input Options

You got a peek at the input options panel when you first loaded the Battle Station and used it to input your login details.

There are a lot of options, as I tried to make each aspect of the Battle Station customizable for personalization.

So don’t be intimidated by the amount of options there are – they are all set to an optimal default setting which is how most traders (including myself) use the tool.

If you need to get back to the input options, press CTRL+i to bring up the loaded indicators window.

Note: If you see more than one instance of the Battle Station loaded, you should delete the duplicates so there is only one per chart. This happens when you load the Battle Station more than once per chart.

Once you click the edit button (or just double click on the Battle Station in the list), you are brought back to the input options.

You will need to come back here from time to time if you need to adjust settings.

Throughout this guide, we will talk more about how you can customize these options to get a personalized experience from the Battle Station.

Creating Your Own Color Theme

One of the first issues people come across is the color theme.

The Battle Station has an automatic theme setter, so you don’t have to configure all the chart colors and settings every time you load a chart.

If you want to make color adjustments to your chart – you need to turn off the theme setter!

Go to the input options:

Above: Set the chart_color_theme_setup option to NO_THEME_CHANGE to disable the theme setter

To make color changes to the candlestick markers, select the colors tab, and follow this cheat sheet.

Above: This tab is where you can make changes to the candlestick patter markers on the chart.

To change the breakout markets on the chart, navigate to the input options:

Once you’ve customized the Battle Station the way you want it. Press the F8 key, or right click on the chart and select properties from the popup menu.

Above: Where you customize your chart colors (candlestick colors, background colors, etc.)

As long as the theme control option is turned off, you will be able to make these color changes to your chart theme – which is a perfect segway into the next section…

Saving the Battle Station as Part of Your Template

Ok – you’ve gone through the effort of changing all the color options for:

• The candlestick pattern markers
• The breakout markers
• Chart colors

We don’t want to have to do this more than once – which is where chart templates come in handy.

Chart templates will save:

• All your Battle Station input options (from the input tab)
• The Battle Station Candlestick marker colors (from the color tab)
• The charting colors (from the chart properties tab)

Once you’ve set everything up the way you wanted, and cleared all unwanted objects – you can go ahead and save the template file.

Right click on the chart again to bring up the pop-up menu. Click on template -> save template…

Name the template to whatever you like and press the save button.

If you need to load any custom templates you’ve made, just do the following…

Right click on any chart and navigate to template -> Load Template…

Then simply select the template you wish to load:

That pretty much covers the basics of customizing your MT4 template with the Battle Station.

Now you know how to create your own templates.

As we venture into the guide further, you will discover other options you might want to change in the Battle Station.

If you make any changes to the Battle Station input options later, you will need to re-save your template, and save over the top of your previous one to update it.

Just remember not to re-save your updated template with any support or resistance levels, or objects as discussed above.

See you in the next chapter.