QUOTETRACKER. Kill them. Why keep wasting money on something totally useless? TWS charts are ugly, slow and awkward. The least you could do is move the charts to a different program/module, so they don't waste my computer resources. The best you could do is improve and maintain compatibility with QT. Perhaps buy QT from Ameritrade and let Jerry continue his fantastic work.
I use multicharts to trade with Patssystems and IB...running automated systems for hedgefunds and for CTA accounts. Multicharts has provided tremendous professional advancements and tools for me. Their 64bit implementation is a very significant one and is very efficient and stable. Their support has been very diligent and committed. Every day i wake up and where I used to hate to launch other platforms, for example Tradestation or many others because of all their short comings in the morning...I genuinely look forward to getting my day started with Multicharts. We are running both Swing (overnight) and day trade system which execute thousands of orders across their accounts per day. I have been able to develop the tools necessary to to this and to be within 5 milliseconds of the market using multicharts and IB. I do believe that IB needs to allow a non TWS based execution for the multicharts platform (and probably others) to be most efficient. But things are working very nicely for very complex systems and implementations and I have to say I could not be much happier with multicharts than I am. The markets have been exceptionally challenging this year and additionally day trading is extremely challenging in any environment especially a supra choppy one like we have currently...Multicharts has been able to support every task that I have ask it to and the ones that it did not support I pointed out to the Multicharts team and they very promptly added functionality that enabled me to accomplish my objectives. I highly recommend multicharts for professional traders who trade at IB or anywhere else for that matter. If anyone would like more feedback please feel free to contact me...below I have included an example of some of the complex trades that we are running via MC. In fact they are considerably more complicated that what you see since the orders are all throttled meaning we never send more contracts for any order at anyone time than the market can support...therefore a 40 or 50 contract trade in TF would likely be broken up into 3 to 10 contract chunks.
The best possible solution, one I suggested repeatedly, was for IB to just buy the QCharts platform. I use ninja because it is free. It's a very good platform, but occasionally there are glitches with historical IB data or getting the various exchange times to synch up properly. I have never used IB charting, but I experiment with it at times and agree it is much improved. Still, it seems aimed at people who want to put up a couple of charts, not someone running 10 monitors. I concur with the suggestion that IB stop larding TWs down with every conceivable feature. Make them add-ons or come out with a lean, bare-bones version for people who just want to use it as an execution platform, ie something like the TWS of a few years back.
I want to add some color to the issue of data quality when using IB for quotes. I will not use IB as a primary data sourceâ¦though my systems will confirm an IB bid/offer the actual chart never uses IB dataâ¦the reason for this is their historical data is of dubious quality and realtime bars often skip tick and therefore will not show a low or high tick correctly. This is due to the fact that IB quotes are sent via timed updates rather than pushed out for every trade. Therefore, you will get significant differences on shorter term charts 10 minutes or less and especially big differences on 2 to 3 min charts. I would recommend using IQ Feed over esignal but most definatlely would NOT use IB for data to drive a chart for automated trades.
This. It's not worth the time to fix tws; the platform is just too bad. TD Ameritrade was smart when they bought out TOS; they got a solid tech platform and more clientele. Tradestation might've been a good buy for IB. Maybe buy out ninjatrader or multicharts or yes develop a whole new platform.
I use IB charts and think they're pretty good. The other charts I use are stockcharts.com, which I think is a good frame of reference. Three suggestions: 1) Most important: Let us overlay volume data on the bottom of the chart as can be done with charts at stockcharts.com, this saves screen space. 2) Let us set multiple ignored daily time intervals. Being able to only set one interval can be very limiting when working with futures. 3) Need more descriptive indications than just short horizontal lines on the chart which show past trades. These are hardly visible and are confusing. Up/down arrows or something more descriptive would be much easier to understand. One bug: The "Graphical Position Indicator" in Configuration has a bug, at least for stocks. When you select "Show Position Indicator" then "Custom," the setting is not saved if you close the chart and then reopen it, whereas it does seem to be saved for futures.
I find TWS charting cumbersome, but there are many other good charting programs from which to model. One element that has been mentioned only briefly here, but is critical for some traders, is data quality. While I understand that raw and complete tick data is important for some trading styles, much more important for mine is accurate data that reports trades at the actual time they occurred (though they may be reported by exchanges late) and has discarded bad trades that were misreported by the exchange. Tickdata has a white paper on their site describing in general the type of algorithm used to cleanse data. Algorithms can be run live or after the close on historic data, but whether or not streaming data is raw or cleansed, it is most important that data for previous sessions be clean. Thanks for the effort IB.
More Quotetracker-like for me would be a BIG step in the right direction. Don't even want to think about learning new software right now. Got Quotetracker just how I like it. I know there are better combos/packages out there but, I have used IB together with Quotetracker for a long time now.