Donna, Direct chart trading is okay (imo) for the CL for scalping if you going to set it up and not have to move the stop/target lines around afterward too close to the last transaction. Clicking a line and dragging it around is super slow in comparison to single clicking a DOM column cell with no confirmation. We're talking 2-4 secs vs a 1/4 sec mouse click which can cost you some on a 1 min chart. But you have the resources to go beyond that. Your husband can program. It's not hard at all to build your own price ladder (PL) and customize it for your trading style. Your broker is IB, right? It's cake to use their ActiveX component with C# and Windows Forms. All the hard stuff has been done for you already as far at the lower level trade and price messaging goes. What I'm currently doing is have my charting package send over entry signals to my PL and it can also send add-on signals for more positions. NO WAY I could enter these kinds of trades manually on non-time based charts like tick and volume and range charts. I can setup custom brackets and reversals off of the stop or target by overloading either with more contracts than the entry size and also immediately protect the reversed quantity with new stop / target brackets. On the entry brackets, I can simply click the pre-target or pre-stop on the PL and then adjust their respective stop/target values in case I expect more or less from a break-up or break-down. I can get out of a trade based on a dollar value or move my stop up based on one. When I add to a trade on a scalp chart, sometimes price moves so quickly that I have to protect a max dollar loss or live gain made because I'm working with higher leverage which can turn on me. I pretty much know now what point targets of 20, 30, etc can yield with add-ons (even when I don't know the specific entry order prices in real-time) and also know I can get very brief moments of live max gains (where I'm satisfied vs the initial risk) and the computer is going to know and react to getting out far more quickly than human decision. It's all open to your imagination and specific needs. YOU are in control of what it can do. So many things I haven't mentioned and you would have a blast telling your husband what you need as the capabilities improve and you think of new ways to enhance your style of trading. My next step is to build my own charting to go along with it and then I can make direct chart trading far more flexible than this commercial krahp you see. They cater to the generic. There's always some roadblock they'll throw in your way once you see what you did with your PL and then want to innovate direct chart trading beyond what vendors provide. No, you're not going to lose $1000's from programming mistakes. Handling the messaging and keeping track of your position is just not that hard. You can get a basic PL up showing live bid/ask/last in less than a week (1 day if you're familiar with the IB interface). You can get basic order management up in another two. Planning for multiple symbols on multiple PL's running at the same time AND in multiple IB accounts takes more time. Don't worry about that. Do the basic, knowing you're going to rebuild it with more experience gained. The rebuilds are fast because you can reuse so much of the old code, just better organized to handle the more advanced requirements. In the meantime, sure, try a direct chart interface from whatever place. But build YOUR dream PL in parallel. You can integrate your husband's auto-trading code as a part of that and then the wheels of your imagination will REALY start to turn! [You won't even have that DOM number junk on it]
Thank you , Steve, for your detailed input on this. I've realized pretty quickly that DOM order entry is by far faster for me. I believe my resident Geek may be able to code my trading strategies. The setups/entries are easy, but coding all the contextual information is the challenge. Thanks again! (ADD: Can you turn on your PM, I want to send you a message?)
I love IB's ChartTrader. Visually it's very helpful, especially if you trade off fibs or pivot points. CL chart, with a potential short sale, including stop and target. The price movement off of some of the pivot points are very clean. <a href="http://s1182.beta.photobucket.com/user/potodds/media/chart_trading_zpsa9bb9379.png.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1182.photobucket.com/albums/x454/potodds/chart_trading_zpsa9bb9379.png" border="0" alt=" photo chart_trading_zpsa9bb9379.png"/></a>