I believe this may be a simple way to automate any trading system (especially futures) which can be considered to be a 100% mechanical method: Here is a way to automate Metastock(or any Trade System) with Futures Trader.... www.futures-trader.net Futures Trader (FT) has a box labeled "contracts". No position and it will show 0. If long 1 contract it will show 1. If short 1 contract it will show -1. If you use a macro program such as Macro Express www.macros.com you can copy and store that information into a variable. You can also check to see what the value of the variable is! Now if your Expert (which can show all buys and sells) gives a buy, the macro will recognize the popup window alert by the name of the window and will run a macro defined for that specific action, in this case a buy. The macro can then be configured to copy the "contracts" to a variable called "contracts" and check the value of contracts. Then the macro will do an if...if 0 it will click on Long Market, etc. or you can enter a value in the limit box. If contracts is >0 already long, you can either tell the macro to add or end...no more contracts. If <0 you are short and you can tell the macro to click on Reverse Position! and you are long. Very simple to setup with Metastock and Macro Express. Macro Express is a very capable program that can do alot and is perfect for such a simple type of trade system to automate. Works great for futures which Futures Trader is ideal for use. Now Macro Express will work with Tradestation as well, if TS can provide an Alert Window popup. May be worth looking into. Stops, well they can be automatically set with FT's autobracket feature ahead of time and will be set upon taking a position. Bob I used Macro Express and Metastock for this purpose in 2002 but without FT. It will be much easier with FT!
method for the automation of Metastock would be Dynaorder. www.dynaorder.com It is due to be released in May. Dynaorder has a grouping of commands which when used along with the buy and sell orders generated by MS via a realtime Expert can send orders to IB's TWS for execution. Stops can be dtermined via actual fill prices called from TWS and used in MS to determine the proper stop value or target values to send to TWS for order placement. Anyway a couple of ideas if you want to automate Metastock.
Here's another one which is listed on our Traders Toolbox page (under Resources) MetaServer RT for InteractiveBrokers submitted by www.traders-soft.com Rating (1 to 5) Total votes: 2 Vote URL http://www.traders-soft.com Category Charts & Data Language C++ Description MetaServer RT 3.0 for Interactive Brokers' TWS version records quotations directly from IB's Java Workstation and update charts of Omega 2000i Products or Equis MetaStock 6.52/7.x/8.x in real time.
Steve, This is simply a method for providing data into TS from IB. My post concerns the automation of trading...hands off 100% mechanical system trading. Bob