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Quick-tips 6 | Why does VWAP plot as a single horizontal line?

Plotting Volume Weighted Average Price

If you create an indicator as follows and apply it to a chart:

Plot1( VWAP );

You will probably see something similar to this:

VWAP applied to a chart
The simple program when first applied to the chart. Because VWAP does not include historical data, we get an horizontal line

The reason for this is that Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP) is a quote fields (a TradeStation Reserved word) that returns a real time snap shot of the value. Quote fields do not reference history.

Other quote fields include: AskSize, AskTime, BidSize, DailyClose, DailyHigh, DailyVolume etc

After we have applied the program to a chart we will then see plot values from the current bar forward.

From about 17:00 the value of the VWAP is now updated in real time