quick question. Is there a way through the ib API to access a particular quote monitor tab/screen and either read the positions on that tab/screen or get that tabs p&l? I've used the API for many years but mainly for order execution and market data - would like to avoid putting everything into a database and get the p&l that way and nothing jumped out within the API documentation to do this.
Are you able to do technical analysis of the market data that you get from IB's API? Or are you only able to do order execution? Thanks
Depends on your definition of technical analysis. You can definitely get historical prices (and obviously real time) and calculate indicators. I use ta-lib for that - here's a list of the functions that ta-lib supports and IB's API let's you fetch the data quickly http://www.ta-lib.org/function.html.
Btw how do you handle the occasional and really annoying HUGE spikes in the price data that IB broadcasts out? I have received them quite a few times when using Ninja Trader and those spikes completely threw all the indicator values off. Thanks
To be honest I've only had spikes in forex data and even there only in one of the data points (bid/ask/last) - never in stocks futures or options. In forex I had logic that accounted for spikes - e.g. take multiple datapoints before the internal last/bid/ask is updated and the indicator is recalculated. I never made money consistently trading forex so that problem resolved itself.
Thanks for your tips. Trading Forex is hard especially with the reduced volume after the 2008 Financial crisis.