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Q: Force Index is not calculated during the day, but only shows value from previous day.
This is an important correction to make for us who uses this indicator. - Hans
A: Because the Force Index uses volume data in its calculation, we do not compute a value for the current period until that period is complete and all the volume for that period has been totaled. This prevents our charts from giving misleading Force Index signals.
For example, consider a hypothetical stock that normally trade 1 million shares per day. Recall that the force index is defined as "the difference between today's close and yesterday's close times today's volume."Let's assume that for each day of the past week, the stock has gone up $1 in a pretty regular manner. In that case, the daily Force index would be around 1 million each day.
Let's also assume that it is now 1 hour into a new trading day and the stock has continued its trend climbing 10 cents so far on 100,000 shares of volume. That means that - 1 hour into the day - the Force index for the day would be at 100,000.
The problem is that if we charted that, you would see a _huge_ drop in the Force index chart from yesterday to today (i.e. from 1 million to 100,000). That 10x drop would be very misleading because the stock hasn't really changed its behavior during that time.
In summary, because plotting the Force Index for an incomplete period next to Force Index values based on complete bars leads to extremely misleading charts, we don't to it. That is also true for other price-volume indicators like the Chaikin Money Flow and OBV.
