Sorry guys, I believe I did not expain very well my problem. I will try to express it in a more detailed way. Alex, as you suggested I double checked my account on TWS. It shows the cash position of every currency I trade against USD, since my base curency is USD. I trade and monitor 18 corrency pairs, the currency involved are: USD, GBP, EUR, CHF, JPY, AUD, CAD, NZD Of course I don't only trade the crosses of the above with USD (like GBP/USD or JPY/USD), but also some crosses between them, like for example EUR/JPY or GBP/AUD. TWS keeps track of the cash position of each currency against the dollar which can be positive or negative. If I trade a pair of currencies not containing USD, like GBP/AUD, TWS wil not dispay the result of the transaction in GBP against AUD, but will only add or subtract the result on the cash position of that currency and will display it against USD. So TWS in the account show a positive or negative cash position for each of the currency traded, therefore one for GBP, one for EUR, CHF, JPY, AUD, CAD and NZD. The balance of each currency is expressed in my base currency, USD. In BT these cash position are shown as lilac FX cash position, with a lilac dot on the tab of the currency and on the P&L area. There should be one lilac position for each of the crosses of USD, so one for USD/GBP, one for USD/EUR, USD/CHF, USD/JPY, USD/AUD, USD/CAD, USD/NZD. In other words I should have 7 tabs containing the lilac doc and showing the cash positions. The example attached shows the lilac for USD/CHF and obviously the amount shown on the header matches the cash position shown on TWS. I can switch on or off the lilac position if I want. If they are off, I will still see the lilac dot in the tab, but not the cash position itself. Perfectly fine. So the cash positions of TWS are all displayed by the lilac position and there are no other informations coming from TWS to display. Correct? Now let's assume I turn on TWS at the beginning of the day and I have no trades on my FX portfolio and no order pending, and then I turn on BT. The only thing BT should show are the cash positions of the crosses of the 7 different currencies I trade against the USD. As you can see I have arranged the USD crosses to the left of the container; therefore I should have lilac dots on the first 7 tabs and all the others without dots. I should not have anything else, either strategies, unmanaged positions or orders. Correct? Of course I do want to use the strategies, what I would like to get rid of are the unwanted unmanaged position that I don't undersstand why they are there. But I will come back to these position with screen shot in a following post
I have attache one of the unmanaged strategies that IMO should not be there. I don't have anything on my FX portfolio and no order pending. As you can see th strategy is for CAD/YEN, and for a value of 50k, which of course is not something concerning a cash position in my TWS account. This strategy is unmanaged, so it does not contain trigger or target or stop losses, but it should not be there and I don't know how to make it disappear. I have the feeling that BT must be somhow out of sync with TWS. The above strategy probably comes from an old transaction I made several days ago and for some reason TWS kept it open. If you look at the tabs at the bottom of the attachements you will notice several green or red dots. Each of the relative pairs contains one of these unmanaged strategies which do not correspond to any of my FX cash positions in TWS. Furthermore several of thes strategies are for a value of 50k, which is the amount I generally use for my positions, which also convinces me that they are old trades I made and for some reasons have been kept on BT. Apart from that I must say that I find this software perfectly adapted to my needs, this is the reason why I am trying very hard to understand what is going on. Finally I cannot contact BT tech support anymore, as I get error messages on my email. But in any case, after hundred of mails and screenshots I just didn't manage to get the message across, maybe because we are both not native English speakers
What error message do you get when you try to email ButtonTrader support? I just had a temporary problem accessing their web site, it did not work, but now does. Please visit their web site and download the document "Forex Trading" (to be found in the "documentation" menu). Forex trading with IB takes some time to understand. That's wrong: it must be there because this is the ButtonTrader way. "Unmanaged strategy" may be an unhappy term which seems to confuse you. It indeed means you have no working orders for that position, nowhere. Why then does ButtonTrader show it? Because it will offer you the "X" button to immediately close that position. A click in the Sell/buy columns is very different: it will open a new position with its own target/stopp-loss orders. Or you may convert it into a managed strategy. You see this position in ButtonTrader because you traded CAD/YEN at some time. TWS will only adjust the CAD and YEN cash positions and forget about the trade that's it. If you want to trade like that then ButtonTrader is not for you, because ButtonTrader treats forex transactions like stock/futures transactions. I again suggest that you reread that document: "Forex Trading".
I did manage to send an email now. They must have some issue with the website, as I cannot connect with it. I have read the Forex document many times. It does indeed expain how BT should keep track om my forex budgt in TWS and that indeed works correctly (almost). The forex doc does not say anything about unmanaged strategies to be shown on forex trading. All the different docs say about managed strategies is that they can be transformed into a managed one by clicking on the question mark. They also say that they are generally due to a transmission error between BT and TWS or with the broker. They do not say how to get rid of them. I agree with the fact that the CAD/JPY transaction was due to a previous trade I did. But why I only get them randomly and not for all trades? is BT planned for having an unmanaged strategy for each trade I have made? Do thos US have to stay on my screen forever? Also beside those US generated byy previous trades, I also have some other with strange values, like 79,243. Of course these numbers do not correspond to any previous trade and they certainly are not reflecting FX cash positions (the positions in my account are much smaller than that). I really have the impression that there is something not funcioning prooperly , maybe in the connection between BT and TWS
OK guy, problem solved. Thanks a lot for the help. It was actually an unusual error due to certain trades coming from TWS. I have cleaned the folde, got rid of the offending strategies and from now on I will only trade from BT, so this should not happen again
I haven't read the entire thread, but do you trade futures in other currencies than your IB base currency? You could have some small fx positions in IDEAL as the result of fx-conversion from transactions not in your base-currency.