Tradestation is a COMPLETELY different game. It's an integrated charting, backtesting and autoexecution platform with its own language (which has been around for over 10yr and has a big following) and it's light years far ahead of anything that can be realistically achieved as TWS-charting-addon written in Java. So there is simply no comparison. All I'm saying is that IB was smart to make its API open and available and sofar many charting sw (ranging from simpler one to the top-of-the-line ones like Ensign) and execution front-ends support IB. IMO it's fine for TWS to provide some charting functionality, as long is has minimal impact on order execution speed, stability and responsiveness. But for anything more demanding, I think one should use one of the many fine charting sw which work with IB feed. This is also a strength of IB, that it can work with some of the best charting and order mgmt apps.
version77, I can't speak for other developers, but we are definitely not "threatened" by IB charts As for the API, I do have a problem with the expanded time frames on the data. The currently planned expansion where the data will be available for a week, but at the expense of higher frequency is useless for QuoteTracker users. We need the data in 1 minute frequency if its for just a week. The way it is now is frankly going to do us more harm than good - We can't use the data, but will now have to answer dozens of emails asking why. Jerry Medved http://www.quotetracker.com
So you cant use this new data?? damn that sucks! What bars are you getting on the 1 day data from IB currently?1 min or 5 min? btw how is the expanded historical chart data project going?
For 1 day of data, IB returns 1 min bars. We could do multiple hits each time we do a backfill - one for 1 day and another for 5 days, but a) thats going to put double the load on the servers b) we would have to program it - not something that can be implemented in existing versions c) it will slow down the backfill d) will make it so that charts with a frequency that is not a multiple of 5 will look weird, which will drastically increase support emails (and thus our headaches) and people will think that its a bug in QT when its really a problem with the data. We don't want to have to deal with that much of a headache. Its not worth it.
On Monday morning, two day charts show no data aparrently because the weekends are not elimiated from the chart programming. I have all blank charts this morning premarket.
Weekends are eliminated if you use a fairly new version of TWS (don't know which one for sure). Which build are you using?
It is definitely changed in 846.3 (current beta), and you are right, it was not skipping weekend in 845.5.