Hi, I am learning theory. What I want to do now is "watch" a few stocks/futures live in the market. But I cannot do this at my full time job. So I'd love to do it at night: watch a stock or a e-mini future for a few weeks, running at maybe 2x or 5x speeds. So the answer is software with playback capability, it seems. I did a search here on ET and Ensign came up quite a bit. I downloaded the trial, and am enjoying it. If anyone subscribes or knows the answer, please answer: 1. Can Ensign playback a random stock I pick, say NE? I see it plays back data for a few preselected futures from 5 days ago to 50 days ago. 2. Can I playback a stock's/future's data for the last, say, 6 months? Ensign is affordable, so I'd like to stick with it if it can do the above. If not, what are other software choices--free or commercial--for playback of any stock/future with any date range? Thank you in advance, Bracca P.S. Moderator, I tried and was not able to delete this post in the "who buys" thread in the "Trading" forum. Please delete it there if you see fit.
eSignal supports the playback function for system testing that you can control the speed of the action. New version eSignal 10.0 to be released in September. Check it out here: http://www.esignal.com/ Chuck
Chuck, Thank you. esignal is quite a bit more expensive per month, as it's $125. Anyway, to other newbies that might use the search feature to look for playback software: I kept looking and found NinjaTrader is free for simulating. It even has a playback feature. But for the playback feature you actually have to record the data for later playback. You can't just download a day's activity and play it back. So when I leave for work (which has nothing to do with trading), I turn on NinjaTrader and let it record a stock I am interested in. Then when I get home I play it back. I'm not sure if I can record multiple stocks at the same time. NinjaTrader has a clean layout and is lots less busy than Ensign. Regards, Bracca
I use Ensign for this purpose. I don't playback stocks, just futures. You can "save" any of the last five trading days as a playback file for any futures contract available through the DTN delayed/download feed that Ensign comes with, even Asian and European futures contracts. Although I've never tried to record data for stocks, I don't know why it wouldn't work just the same. So for your needs, you just need to decide which instruments you want to record, and at least once a week you need to create the playback files for the last five days. As time goes by, you can slowly build up your library of playback files. Of course, if you just want to papertrade ES, NQ, or YM, you can download several years worth of playback files from dacharts. That should keep you busy for a while.
I really wanted to use Ninja's free playback function, but the disadvantage is you have to actually record market data from a real time source. This might work for some folks, but would never work for me since I'm not in a position to record market data every day due to travel, etc. I like the convenience of only needing to create my playback files once a week, and I can do it for as many different contracts as I want.
Sierra Charts has a playback feature which allows you to playback multiple charts simultaneously. It might suit your needs. Good luck.
Mike, thanks. I could not figure out how to use historical data to create playback files in Ensign. I'd love to know. Can you do a quick step-by-step? I read their docs and watched their videos, but still no go. Thanks.