Thanks. I understand the dynamics of it better now. Although I have to say that it was my own fault for transmitting a limit when I meant to transmit a stop, and then getting a shitty fill afterhours on NQ. Live and learn.
I believe that Transmit and Cancel should not be next to each other on the TWS pop-up menu. Sometimes, I want to cancel my order, not placed yet, completely and really dread doing it because I am afraid I will hit Transmit by accident. That's not a good solution. And they should indicate in their execution reports whether the order was limit or stop. I think I sent a limit buy order ( 6 handles away from the market) and not a stop one and that's why it was filled right away at the market. Had they indicated that in their reports I would know for sure what I did... Well, I guess, I learned how to be more careful, but I do hope that the new version of Auto Trader will help a lot here. Bracket Trader did not live to its promise, I cannot trust in basic things.
Maybe make Transmit and Cancel separate hot keys and make them really far apart on the keyboard? Like F1 = Transmit, F10 = Cancel. Of course, what if you forget the correct mapping and you press F1 to Cancel? However, the likelihood of an error happening is probably smaller using the keyboard as compared to the mouse-menu system on the TWS. Carl
I have cancel mapped to the ecape key and transmit to F12. I use them with different hands and never mix those two up. Limit & stop, I mix up, but that's another story. JPB
I have set up hot-keys for the order types I use. To avoid confusion, I have color-coded the keys, that is I glued some color-sticks on each hot-key. The idea is not to have a color for each key (that is like remembering the letters) but to have some basic meaning for each color and mix the colors and order the keys in a hopefully logical way. Basic logic is: green is buy, blue is sell. The keys are ordered in a that scheme: BUY (with default settings) = G (colored green) when I have bought, I want to place a stop loss, so SELL STP = J (colored blue/green) SELL LMT = L (colored blue). Next row on the keyboard is used for sell orders. A buy-order is then placed the following way: Press "G" (Buy) + transmit, when order is filled, place stop-loss by pressing "J" (+ transmit) and if I like it, I'll press "L" (+ transmit) (sell Limit, profit target). Prepare "Exit at Market" that is press "Close Position". In fact, there are some more keystrokes involved, b/c after generating one order line and transmitting it, you have to highlight the market data line again by using the up arrow key. transmit, Cancel and Close Position each have their own color. If you do not like colors, try buying a sheet with small sticky letters that you place on your keyboard. An idea I did not try, is buying a programmable special purpose keyboard and configure it according to your wishes. I think this has been discussed on ET in another thread. Regards Bernd Kuerbs