I was wondering if there was a quicker and more efficient way to equally divide up your cash balance into an equal % and enter the market with market orders. For example.. say you have 100,000 and want to trade 20 preselected stocks. Is there a way to simply enter the stocks and then enter 5 % per position and have tws automatically prepare your orders based on your information. I know about the rebalance option..it helps but it not quite there...problem is I have to actually enter 5 % manually on every order going down . And if that wasn't bad enough, I have to do this for two accounts. Then when I press create orders it will only create limit orders even though my default is set to market orders. This creates a problem because I then have to go back and manually change the limit that didn't execute to market...again in two accounts. I wish I could just enter my stocks, tell it 5 % per position or a 5000 per position in one spot and then have it automatically create market orders that I can transmit myself. Can this be done with the batch order entry. Nick
NKNY, You may want to consider doing this in excel, using the DDE Api into TWS. Simple stuff that works quite well for exactly this kind of thing. Happy trading.
You might take a look at ButtonTrader. You simply enter a 5% of NetLiq in the quantity box (above the PriceLadder) and it will calculate the correct number of Lots the moment you click buy (or sell)..You can also use other percentages: on NetLiquidationValue, Funds, Risk, MarginNeeds or EquityWithLoan. You can do that for Multi-Accounts, so in your case one click, for both accounts, but not (yet) for a batch of Stocks (so you still need to do this action per stock). See this screenshot:
So I would have to transmit each stock one by one or can I send them all at once with market orders. It would be ideal if I could enter all the stocks then a % number and have the software figure out how many shares of each stok I need to buy and then send them all at once. Thanks for the heads up on button trader will look into it.. Nick
Yes it would be ideal to enter all 20 stocks in a bag, having each 5% (or another percentage). But that's not yet implemented. You can have 20 tabs with the stocks you selected, and then quickly tab to launch your trades. Of course you can use the Market-order to Open. I don't know if it helps you in your way of trading, it might be more convenient but its a personal thing I guess.
the button trader route does look very simple. slightly more complex would be doing this via the basket page. you can load up your portfolio as a basket and choose to transmit X% of it at a time. if interested, do a search on the web site for "creating a basket file" and look up baskets via the online manual.
Hi def, I need to send the whole portfolio at one time. Is there a way to tell the basket page to figure out how much of each stock it should buy to bring every position to about x% of account value. The rebalance order entry is almost what I need. I don't use it to rebalance, I use it to open positions. The problem is I have to enter the % allocation for each position and it doesn't give me the option to create market orders. With limit order, not all stocks get executed and I then have to change them to market. Can you suggest that they add the ability to enter your %allocation in one box and then somehow tell tws to use the same % for all positions. And to allow market orders when someone has the default order set to market. Thanks Nick
NKNY On the basket page, in the execute basket panel, where it says quantity, change it from % to USD and check "Use per-contract quantity percentage". Now enter the total dollar amount for your basket. For each security you can set it's percentage of the basket in the % "user defined percentage" column. I think that's what you are looking for.
Hi dave, I just tried a little test with about 5 stocks... I didn't execute them just set them up I did everything you said but the order quantity next to the action is showing 100 for each of my stocks. It seems like it didn't take into consideration my dollar amount or my % entry. Nick