kevindog, how would you get ATR%? The non-backadjusted data (spliced) could still have some gaps. Or would you scrap ATR% and just use ATR? Is that still valid across time?

UPDATE:

So I measured this and it appears that calculating ATR% on the non-backadjusted series will work fine even though there are some gaps at rollover points. With a 20 day ATR, any gaps are in the noise it seems.

I tested CL from 1/1/2009 to today (11/13/2018) and compared non backadjusted to backadjusted (panama method). The difference in ATR% is largest at the start, about a 2.5x difference, which is proportional to the price differences in the two series.

Clearly, we don't want to use the backadjusted data for ATR%. A 2.5x difference is significant so, yes, this confirms the importance of using the unadjusted series.

But also, a visual inspection shows us that the gaps in the unadjusted series don't appear to create any significant issues.

I'm working through Van Tharp's book "Definitive Guide to Position Sizing Strategies." In this book he discusses identifying the market type. He highlights six market types based on trend and volatility:

* Up Volatile
* Up Quiet
* Sideways Volatile
* Sideways Quiet
* Down Volatile
* Down Quiet

He suggests using a 20 day ATR% indicator for measuring volatility.

The ATR% is just the 20 day ATR divided by the current day close times 100. This then gives us the volatility as a percentage of price.

ATR% = 100 * ATR(20)/Close[0]

The nice thing about this is that it normalizes the volatility across time. For example, if 20 years ago, the price was $100 and the volatility was 1% we'd typically see +/- $1 fluctuations in price. But say the price is now $1000 and volatility is still about 1% with price fluctuations of about $10. There's a 10 fold difference in dollar volatility, but the percent volatility is still the same...and so we want to work with this percent volatility so we are not misled by the fact the price is significantly different.

This works great for equities which are typically split adjusted, but it's not so straight forward with futures.

We typically work with backadjusted continuous contracts using the offset or panama method to stitch contracts together. But due to backwardation and contango effects, the real price a few years ago may be significantly different than the backadjusted price, yielding an invalid ATR%.

The right way to do this, I think, is to use ratio/percentage adjusted continuous contracts, but it seems that most data providers, including NinjaTrader and Kinetick/IQFeed do not offer ratio adjusted continuous contracts from what I can tell.

Does anyone have suggestions for how to get a valid ATR% for backadjusted futures or perhaps another comparable approach that would give a measure of volatility that could be properly compared across the years?

Thanks,

If you use simple backadjustment (adding or subtracting an offset to align prior months to the current month), this will not have any impact on average range or average true range. Absolute prices will differ from their historical values, but as high, low and close are all shifted by the same value, ATR will be not by affected by the change in absolute prices.

Therefore all ATR values will remain valid through out the backadjusted chart.

However, ATR will be invalid for

- a merged non adjusted chart (which makes appear the rollover gaps)
- ratio backadjusted chart
- a perpetual future obtained by interpolating the values from different contract months

Just stay with simple backadjustment, and all ATR values will be good.

Thanks, Fat Tails! Yes, I agree if we're only talking about ATR. ATR% is a little more complicated, though, because it's ATR divided by price and we want that price to be the unadjusted price, and unfortunately we have gaps in the unadjusted data.

As Kevin mentioned we'd have to adjust for those price gaps. This is where the ratio backadjusted series, I believe, would actually give correct values for the ATR% because even though all prices are ratio adjusted they are adjusted in the same proportions. The ATR alone from a ratio adjusted series would not be valid, but ATR% is. This is just like split adjusted charts for equities where ATR% is valid.

I thought I might be able to derive a valid ATR% from just the regular backadjusted and unadjusted charts. I'm still thinking about that. It's more than I really want to get into right now.

The eventual goal is to generate a distribution of volatility for a long history of each market in order to quantify the historical mean volatility. Then we can know if a market is quiet or volatile compared to its own history. But if we're using just ATR as our measure of volatility and ATR today is not directly comparable to ATR 10 years ago, then our distribution wouldn't be valid. ATR% is a normalized form of volatility which can be directly compared regardless of price differences.

You are correct, I was tired yesterday, and did not read the definition for ATR%.

Anyhow, the ATR% is not an obvious measure for relative volatility. The problem here is that different instruments have a different beta, and therefore a value X could mean high volatility for a low beta stock while it means low volatility for a high beta stock.

In fact you will need a different scale for determining relative volatility for each stock! It is a bit like the scale of the MACD. Try to find an overbought or oversold level for a MACD. It is possible, but you will need a different scale for each instrument, bar type and timeframe.

A mathematically coherent approach to measuring relative volatility would apply a mathematical norm to the average true range by using a lookback period of 252 (number of working days in a year typically used for calculating annualized volatility). The scale of this measure is universal for all instruments.

And you may use standard mergebackadjusted futures without any problems.