## Thursday, 18 October 2018

### A Bull Bear Background Plotting Function for Octave

As part of my recent research I have found it convenient to write another custom plotting function for Octave, which plots a single line price plot against a conditionally coloured background, e.g. two separate colours for bull and bear market regimes.

Being able to plot like this avoids the necessity to keep flipping between two separate charts to compare the plot of a potential input feature and a plot of price. So, without further ado, here is the code for the function:
## Copyright (C) 2018 dekalog
##
## This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
## (at your option) any later version.
##
## This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
## but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
## GNU General Public License for more details.
##
## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
## along with this program.  If not, see .

## -*- texinfo -*-
## @deftypefn {} {@var{retval} =} bull_bear_background_plot (@var{price}, @var{condition})
##
## Plots price with different, vertically coloured background stripes, according
## to the integer values 1, 2... etc contained in condition.
##
## see https://web.njit.edu/~kevin/rgb.txt.html for colour codes
##
## @seealso{}
## @end deftypefn

## Author: dekalog
## Created: 2018-10-17

function [retval] = bull_bear_background_plot ( price , condition )

% if price is a row vector, change it to a column vector
if ( size( price , 1 ) == 1 && size( price , 2 ) > 1 )
price = price' ;
endif

up_lim = max( price ) ; low_lim = min( price ) ;
x = [ 1 : size( price , 1 ) ]' ;
y = unique( condition ) ;

ix1 = find( condition == y(1) ) ; color1 = [ 173 216 230 ] ./ 255 ; % LightBlue
ix2 = find( condition == y(2) ) ; color2 = [ 255 228 225 ] ./ 255 ; % MistyRose

if ( low_lim >= 0 ) % all prices are positive; normal for a price chart

bar( x(ix1) , ones(size(ix1)).*(1.05*up_lim) , 1 , 'facecolor' , color1 , 'edgecolor' , color1 ) ; hold on ;
bar( x(ix2) , ones(size(ix2)).*(1.05*up_lim) , 1 , 'facecolor' , color2 , 'edgecolor' , color2 ) ;
plot( price , 'k' , 'linewidth' , 2 ) ; axis([min(x),max(x),0.95*low_lim,1.05*up_lim]) ; grid minor on ; hold off ;

elseif ( up_lim > 0 && low_lim &lt; 0 ) % plotting an ocscillator around a zero line
% or perhaps some negative back-adjusted prices

bar( x(ix1) , ones(size(ix1)).*(1.05*up_lim) , 1 , 'facecolor' , color1 , 'edgecolor' , color1 ) ; hold on ;
bar( x(ix1) , ones(size(ix1)).*(1.05*low_lim) , 1 , 'facecolor' , color1 , 'edgecolor' , color1 ) ; ;
bar( x(ix2) , ones(size(ix2)).*(1.05*up_lim) , 1 , 'facecolor' , color2 , 'edgecolor' , color2 ) ;
bar( x(ix2) , ones(size(ix2)).*(1.05*low_lim) , 1 , 'facecolor' , color2 , 'edgecolor' , color2 ) ;
plot( price , 'k' , 'linewidth' , 2 ) ; grid minor on ; hold off ;

elseif ( up_lim &lt; 0 ) % all prices are negative

bar( x(ix1) , ones(size(ix1)).*(1.05*low_lim) , 1 , 'facecolor' , color1 , 'edgecolor' , color1 ) ; hold on ;
bar( x(ix2) , ones(size(ix2)).*(1.05*low_lim) , 1 , 'facecolor' , color2 , 'edgecolor' , color2 ) ;
plot( price , 'k' , 'linewidth' , 2 ) ; axis([min(x),max(x),1.05*low_lim,0.95*up_lim]) ; grid minor on ; hold off ;

endif

endfunction

and here is what a plot looks like:
with the light blue background highlighting an uptrend and the MistyRose highlighting a downtrend in the black sine wave plot. At the moment the function is not very polished and is hard coded for only these two colours, but it would be a trivial task to extend its functionality to more than two conditions and have the colours as a user input. However, this is low down on my list of priorities at the moment. I hope readers who use Octave as I do find this function useful.