well, I complained about TWS charts but this morning I was using my Sierra Chart and Barcharts.com setup and I wanted to trade an earnings surprise stock... wow, the connection with TWS got horked up, the data was coming in with very low volume, way off on that, who knows why.. so I needed to figure out what to use next time.. TWS chart is way better for that, I can have a list of all the stuff I'm watching in the TWS and have charts with quotes that I can Alt Tab my way through.. and the TWS chart trader is ok for that stuff, just entering with a limit order that gets filled or doesn't.. exit with a market order after a few minutes, not competing with hft's or anything...
Apparently, it's a common problem http://www.traderszone.com/trading-...ierra-chart-ib-trading-barchart-datafeed.html
Thanks for the link to the discussion... I got Sierra Charts because of look and feel probably, and backtesting is done just by replaying [tick]charts. Other packages can't quite do tick level testing so at the time I was into backtesting and I was going to use SC for confirmation testing after backtests with Openquant.. then I found a few indicators I liked in SC but continual simplification of the trading screen has caused all indicators to drop out of the picture.. I like the screen trading for NQ's and lags of a few seconds won't matter but at the open if I'm trying to scalp a little on some news, wow, I need to see charts with quotes, price and volume and SC wouldn't do that for me today but TWS would do a great job of that... I don't know if rat bastards run everything but I've always had feed problems with the best candidates to scalp at the open, just for years it's been like that and it's before the volume picks up too...