Custom indicator for Interactive Brokers TWS

Hi,
I need to build a custom indicator for the IB TWS platform. Does anyone have any information on how to do this?
Thanks,Splat

 

No, that's why I own Multicharts and Amibroker. There are many front-ends available for IB for the very same reason.

 

Thanks but I have Ninjatrader. However, I have found that changing the stock symbol during market hours can be slow (using Ninjatrader w/IQFeed) sometimes. Using IB charts though the change is instantaneous all the time which is why I was looking to program my indicator into IB.

 

Have you asked IB? My guess is that it is not possible to program your own indicator in TWS.

 

You would have to program it through IB's proprietary API which IB offers free of charge to all but it's VERY difficult. You would have to be highly skilled in programming to accomplish this. As @KeLo stated, it would be lot easier to use a 3rd-party vendor like MultiCharts to do this.

 

Is it possible to calculate your own indicator outside of TWS and then have it displayed in a window inside TWS? I was under the impression that displaying it in TWS would be the bottleneck.

 

No because TWS is IB's proprietary trading platform designed in-house so there is no way that they would allow anyone adding indicators to it. IB is NOT a trading software company; it's a broker that just provides trading platform to its clients.

The closest you can get to creating custom indicators based on IB's price feed without using any 3rd-party trading software vendors would be creating them in IB's API which you can download and install and try to work with.

 

Indeed, I agree with those comments. That's why earlier on I answered OP's question with a negative.

 

Ensign Software is ideal for this. You can run the data feed from IB.

http://www.ensignsoftware.com/index.php

http://www.ensignsoftware.com/files/DYO.pdf

PS: Although I don't use it now, back in the day I was using this as MS-DOS system on a Hercules monitor with BMI satellite data feed. Man, I'm old.

 

Does Ensign allow you to program your own indicators and trading strategies to automate your trading? I think that's what the OP is trying to do, create his own customized indicators to analyze IB's price feed. I went onto the Ensign software website but I couldn't find where it offers programming capabilities.