Best RealTime Tools for Futures Trading

Discussion in 'Trading Software' started by feb2006, Sep 10, 2006.

  1. feb2006

    feb2006

    A two part question:

    1.
    Trading Futures: What existing tools would you advice using best to get an intuitive feeling for your trade opportunities?
    ---

    Sometimes I think, it could be interesting so see how this or that calculation result would behave visually, but find it impossible to chart my results appropriately, because most chart providers don't offer the necessary options.

    As simple example think of a chart comparing Volume and Price charting both figures when they really happened (see attached example) without crippling them into bars and hiding all the 'empty' time.

    Realizing such individual charting jobs often requires programming the chart yourself and the most simple way to do it, to my knowledge, is Excel.

    So I would like to ask the following 'part two' questions

    2.
    a. To program a chart yourself is there a software more simple than Excel?

    b. Which values do you think worthwhile to chart them individually?

    Martin
     
  2. feb2006

    feb2006

    If interested in code producing an earlier version of the chart posted above have a look here.
     
  3. feb2006

    feb2006

    What do you think of
    Marketdelta, Tradeflow and UpTick? - Would it be worthwhile to compute and chart similar data?

    And what's your experience with IB TWS based services like MarketDelta-IB? Do they produce useful results even if based on the IB 0.3 second snapshot data, so that it should be possible to produce useful results with Excel too?

    Regards, Martin
     
  4. Just took a look at Market Delta's new versions today. Hooked up with IQFeed and like what I see so far. Tried MD once before but I had too many resource hog programs open and was prone to lock-ups. hope this time goes well.