I never see to much posted in ET on ensign. I was at a meeting the other day with several hedge fund managers and I was surprised to see that quit a few of them used Ensign. I know the people on NQoo's message board people love it and I just bought it for a month trial and wanted some feedback. Initially my comments would be that the charting functions like saving templates and styles seems cumbersome and difficult. Please share your thoughts.
I have just tried a week trial. Didn't realise they did a month one. I also found it a bit cumbersome at first but after a few days, I am starting to like it. For $39.99 a month, I can get historical intra-day charts and I can use the free live feed from interactive brokers. The functions I like so far are the fixed scaling of the charts and the circles tool. I like to customise the drawing tools and having a fixed scale while I scroll through charts is useful. I think it is a good charting package but does require a fair amount of work to get what you want from it. At less than half the price of my previous Qcharts package and with a few functions that I find useful, I am happy with it.
I've used Ensign for a few months now and it's a fine piece of software and the support is excellent. Like every piece of software there are things I wished it had but overall it's great. Tim
i think it is a great piece of software..................IF..........you have the patience and desire to have all that ensign offers... there is definitely a longer learning curve that i cared for. i trade primarily from price itself so alot of the bells and whistles would be wasted on me.... but check it out. the developer is A+
It does have some real quirky things, for example on any indicator you can not get the value of the indicators last bar to the right of it They have separate little windows that display the values .... ? I will say this for $29 and free ib feed, I'm loving it so far and not only that but phone support and online that has blown away any other package I ever paid 200 plus for.
If I were to put Ensign in a class. Its the closest to Investor R/T. Investor R/T is more expensive but can do more. Ensign for its price is good. Two or three years ago, I have tried both and choose Investor R/T. Now I use neither. Michael B.
I find it easily as good, or better, than anything else I have used (Signal, Aspen graphics, Q Charts, FutureSource, etc). You can customize nearly anything with it. I have yet to find something it won't do that I need, and I think its easy to learn. My main pet peave is that changing a chart's symbol isn't as quick as just typing it in (you need to bring up a little edit window first, or mouse click on a menu). If you have a list to see in order, its quite easy though (below). 10 years continuous data for futures is a bit weak too. If you want more it requires 3rd party like CSI, Pinnacle, etc. Things I really like are: Scrolling through a list of contracts that I regularly trade to cherry pick the best ones. All it takes is a single click on an arrow, and instantaneously I have a weekly, daily, 60 min of each contract. I do this for everything I position trade. My whole list gets the look over in just a few minutes (about 30 contracts). Any changes to a contract (any symbol) are automatically saved, by time frame, and show up again even if you delete that window. So trendlines, etc don't go away until I nuke em. No saving required on my behalf. Alarms can be set on damn near anything. Takes up about 5% of my RAM, running about 20 windows at a time, regardless of activity levels. FS would max me out (768 MB), and other programs would run around 30% of max. Jay
Jay this is interesting, how are you getting continuous contracts ? I'm using IB as my data feed is there any way I can do this? Thnx
Does IB even work with Ensign? You would have to give Ensign a call I think. I use DTN with Ensign, and Ensign provides their own data when you bring up a weekly or monthly chart (cause DTN doesn't offer it. Truely pathetic). Signal data offers the same 10 years, at twice the cost to the Ensign user. If Signal ever uses FutureSource data (they now own the company), you will get every contract from the beginning. Important when you start to hit multi year highs/lows. If you are a serious trader, buck up and buy a real data feed. It doesn't cost much. IB does not show every trade BTW, only one each second or something like that. Makes using T&S worthless. I pay $70 for the DTNIQ feed, and then whatever exchanges I want live data for (this does not vary, all vendors charge the same). If you are just daytrading ES for example, its only 10 or 15 bucks. But then again, if you are daytrading, you'd be nuts not to have a real data feed. I guess you aren't though, or you'd not need continuous data (I day trade and position trade). Jay
I used Ensign eons ago with a BMI statellite feed. It was a DOS program. I actually liked it better, probably 'cause I was used to it. I have the Windows version now with IB feed. I still like it, but lord knows, you will never figure out everything it can do! One thing I like is they are very responsive to user suggestions. They have PASCAL based programming language (ESPL), so if you are a programmer, you can do anything you want with it.