As a major-league brokerage, IB has many strengths, but its charts are bush-league, leaving a lot to be desired.
What's baffling is that you can't even select a wide range of colors. Try making a black background with subtly lighter grid lines. Hell, try removing grid lines altogether. Try putting the Y-axis on the right side of a chart and on the left on another. Try setting custom bar intervals (what do you mean I can't see a week's worth of data on anything less than 30 minute bars?). You will end up paying for a decent charting package, downloading the API bridge to IB, and trading off of their charts.
I started study technical analysis 30+ years ago with a program for stock and market T/A, N-Squared Computing by Greg Morris for $2000. I wonder what happened to that guy and his T/A software. He was a pioneer in developing T/A software. I don't use much in the way of indicators these days. But I like ease of use and the way the whole chart looks and feels more so than bells and whistles. Functionality. I liked QT because I could create multiple portfolio's of stocks by sector and track them easily. With QT you can have a portfolio of say technology stocks line by line horizontally showing bid/ask/last/open/close/52week high low etc whatever you want and with 4-5 Charts opened up on top of that, overlayed on the portfolio. I liked that because I could peek at price movements in several dozen stocks all at once by glancing at bid/ask/last and then several charts overlayed on that and I could really get a feel for the markets direction by sectors and such. That worked really well. I have downloaded Ninja and will try out Ninja and IB Charting this week and see if either will work for me. If not it is back to QT.
I know. I spent yesterday morning several hours screwing with it. It was brutal. It got me very frustrated trying to figure simple things out. It appears to be lacking ease of use in a BIG WAY. It took me forever to find the indicators. Turns out they simply weren't there because they weren't enabled. I asked myself why? So beacuse they weren't enabled they simple were no where to be found. AND All those little icons! Aaaaaahhhhh! Come tomorrow morning I will demo Ninja and see how that goes. Maybe play with IB's charting for a few minutes but at this point It appears It isn't for me. I think IB should scrap what they have and start over from scratch and develop a decent easy to use straight forward Charting software. That shouldn't be to hard to do. What they have now is embarrassing. Emphasis on ease of use. They perception I get of IB from using their TWS and now their charting is that they make things more difficult and complex than they need to be or should be. Are you listening IB???? Maybe someone there actually cares.....I'm not sure though.
You want indicators and they are not there, then you claim IB chart is too difficult and complex. Don't you think your thoughts are contradictory? Why should I listen to you? You don't know what you are thinking. PS: don't try TDAmeritrade chart. it's a joke! The bars move out of the window when they reach the right side of the window. You just cannot see the current bar. Fucking hilarious, I don't know what kind of idiot designs the chart at TDAmeritrade.
I feel your pain. I appreciate the efforts their programmers go to include features that people want, but in doing so they customized the charts to mirror how they themselves think. And it's a very bloated, rigid, unwieldy paradigm for viewing market data. I tried Ninja as an alternative, and their charts are much more user-friendly, although (to the extent that I tested) they didn't seem to have many features. As much as people malign eSignal's price and their previous delay issues with tick data from the exchanges, I have to say I'm very satisfied. Almost everything I want I can get there, plus their large javascript efs community has a good deal of indicators and mods to choose from. For what it's worth. Good luck with your head-scratching endeavors!
That's right. The indicators were no where to be found under their icons or from a right click. They should been there without having anyone to have to figure out that they have to be enabled. And a person shouldn't have to search for some obscure buried place to enabled the indicators. The program is a jumbled up mess and is not very functional and lacks ease of use in many regards. What is contradictory about that? Why should you listen to me? Who is asking you to listen to me? .... amazing some of the people you come across on this message board LOL
My 4 hours of frustration is about over as I am not going to invest any more time in Ib's charting aside from some minor looks. I'll put my energy into learning Ninja and if that doesn't work to my liking I will just go back to QT. I'd like to see IB put some effort and resources into producing a kick ass TA program. But I guess that isn't a priority or they do not feel the need that they have to do it to attract or maintain customers. Their charts have obviously been this way for quite some time.