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AmiBroker TA Course

Getting Started with AmiBroker

Parts 1 and 2 were about markets and about data. This part is about a program. From here on, everything the course asks you to do, you do in AmiBroker — and the single biggest predictor of whether the rest of the course goes well is whether the hour or two you spend here is spent properly.

That claim needs justifying, because “set up your software” sounds like a chore to rush. It is not. AmiBroker asks you to make a small number of decisions at the very beginning, and two of them are difficult to reverse afterwards. The base time interval of a database is the clearest example: it decides, permanently in practice, the finest bar your database can ever show you. Choose end-of-day and you will never see a five-minute chart in that database, no matter what you buy or install later. Nothing warns you. The intraday menu entries are simply greyed out, and most people conclude their installation is broken.

What this part is actually for

Section titled “What this part is actually for”

By the end of it you will have a working environment rather than a downloaded program:

  • a licensed or trial AmiBroker whose edition and bitness you can state, not guess
  • a database you created deliberately, separate from the sample database that ships with the program, with a base interval you chose for a reason
  • real price data in it, imported by a route you understand well enough to repeat
  • a universe organised as watch lists and categories, so that later parts can point a scan at “my universe” instead of at everything
  • three chart sheets and a saved layout, so that opening AmiBroker puts you back where you were rather than at a default screen

What you are assembling in this part

  1. Layout and chart sheetsThe arrangement you return to every session
  2. Watch lists and categoriesThe universe your scans will run over
  3. Symbols and price historyImported by AmiQuote or the ASCII importer
  4. Database folderBase time interval, bar count, data sourcehardest to change
  5. AmiBroker installationVersion, edition, 32-bit or 64-bitdecide first
Work upwards. Every layer above the database inherits the choices made in it.

What changes for you

Section titled “What changes for you”

Three things, and they are worth naming because they are the reason this part is not just a manual.

You stop describing charts and start operating a database. In Part 1 a chart was something to read. Here it becomes an output of a system you configured: a symbol selected in a tree, an interval compressed on the fly from stored bars, plotted by a formula that lives in a file. When something looks wrong, you will have four places to look instead of one, and the vocabulary to say which.

You acquire AmiBroker’s own words. The program distinguishes a pane from a sheet from a template from a layout; a watch list from a group from a sector; an interval from a timeframe. These are not synonyms, and every one of them appears in later parts as a precise instruction. This part teaches them from the User’s Guide rather than from habit, so that when Part 12 says “set Apply to = Filter and choose a watch list”, you know exactly which window that is.

You find out what your copy of AmiBroker can and cannot do. AmiBroker ships in two editions with a short, closed list of documented differences, and the free trial is one version behind the licensed release. Rather than discovering the gap in Part 22, you establish it now and write it down.

What you need before starting

Section titled “What you need before starting”
  • A Windows PC. AmiBroker runs on Windows 7 SP1 (with Internet Explorer 11) through Windows 11. Vista and XP are supported only by very old 5.x releases and are out of scope here.
  • About 4 GB of RAM. The published minimum is 1 GB; the guide’s recommended machine is a multi-core CPU at 1 GHz or above with 4 GB or more.
  • Roughly an hour of uninterrupted time for the two labs. The install lab is short. The workspace lab is not, and it is worth doing in one sitting.
  • No paid data subscription. Everything in this part can be completed with free end-of-day data or with a CSV file you already have. Where a paid feed would change what you see, the lesson says so.

How the eight pages fit together

Section titled “How the eight pages fit together”

The first two pages settle what you have installed. The middle four build the database, fill it, organise it and teach you to navigate it. The last page is a long lab that assembles all of it into an environment you keep.

The two labs are not optional decoration. The first is short and mostly verification — it exists so that nothing later in the course fails for a reason you could have found in ten minutes. The second is where the part actually lands: it is the difference between having read about chart sheets and having three of them.

Part3 of 36Level2 — AmiBroker AnalystPages8Estimated time3.9 hours

0 / 8 lessons in this part completed

Sources for this lesson

3 verified · checked 2026-08-31

  1. 01AmiBroker User's Guide — Getting startedamibroker.com/guide/start.html2026-08-31
  2. 02AmiBroker User's Guide — About AmiBroker Editionsamibroker.com/guide/versions.html2026-08-31
  3. 03AmiBroker User's Guide — Understanding AmiBroker database conceptsamibroker.com/guide/h_workspace.html2026-08-31

Every technical claim on this page was checked against the official AmiBroker documentation on the date shown. Where the course disagrees with folklore, the source is how you can tell which one to trust.