True. It would be easy to go overboard on stuff, having the best and brightest, but that just adds to overheads. Then, as a very successful businessman once told me, you are no longer working for yourself, you are working to pay others ie the overheads. Golden rule I follow here is - Don't buy a Rolls Royce to haul bags of cement, get a pickup truck.
i was thinking .. in every entrepreneurial venture i've taken.. i had to be able to fix my own tools, my own truck , know a little to alot about everything.. or at every turn i was paying the mechanic or some other person money i didn't have to fix things while i sat their and waited... i think about ole crazy zucker facebook man.. trying to get someone else to program your app other then yourself is tough... people do it.. but sometimes especially when your starting out you have to do tons yourself... thats why i'm so gonna dig back into programming.. learn some visual basic and java.... i can't afford to pay for crazy expensive software to model reality in securities to see whats really going on and conceptualize what the market is doing.. off the shelf stuff just straight doesn't work that well.. i kinda believe that its not what everyone else is looking at that you will make money off of.. its what you can see that no one else is that you can get an edge with.. and standard tools indicators models etc.. don't give you any additional insight then anyone else has..
I have written API code to export option chains in the format required by Hoadley from another broker and platform (not IB), I am not offering the code but just mentioning that is feasible. Then I will be totally independent of commercial data providers.
Future options are available in Excel from IB via DDE link...all instruments available in TWS are available in Excel....why cant you get them into Hoadley? proprietary stuff?
Per explanation I got from Hoadley IB futures options chains are not provided in a format that his software can use. Barcharts, esignal, OptionsXpress work apparently. No idea why the difference. Truth be told this whole thing seems unnecessarily complicated, but then computer related stuff is typically my way or the highway.
you can use the functions from the hoadley tool.. but the connectioning script you can't to get futures options? is this right that just means your going to have to dig into it yourself.. VB is not a hard language to learn AT ALL
The explanation I got was that the IB data can be received, but it is not in a format that works well for his software. Expiry dates provided only for underlying, not for the options so calculations are distorted. Sorry if I did not make this clear, wee hours of Sunday morning and I'm enjoying my beer.