I need a suggestion as to what product i should buy in order to do the following: I have a list of ~200 symbols, and i want to create alerts based on when the stocks reach a certain price. I want to be able to enter these alerts quickly and easily, and have them stay active until the price is reached. It seems like esignal 'premier' is the way to go, but their website is kind of unspecific and i hope someone here can jsut give me a straight answer.
It's gotta be tradestation. You can monitor 1000 stocks on radarscreen with your own criteria. In my opinion, there is no better software than tradestation if you have a bunch of symbols to monitor.
If it is only price alerts then Quotetracker with RT feed will do that. I found eSignal clumsy and overpriced for this. Data corruption was another issue.
I don't like eSignal's set-up for price based alerts. I had been looking on Tradestation's website, seems like amazing tools. Might want to check them out first. Plus... i hate eSignal, don't let that company screw you out of your money.
You can set price alerts in esignal just by right clicking on the chart at the price you want. Pretty easy and quick. If your alerts are based on some kind of formula or a simple new high/low, I''d use excel with dde from any vendor.
Does IB qualify as a DDE vendor? I havent looked into it yet and am going to check out my IB account and do some reading right now, but if anyone has any tips that would be sweet.
How to install IB DDE Spreadsheet http://www.interactivebrokers.com/php/webhelp//Interoperability/DDE_Excel/Download_dll.htm
Thanks for the link giggollo i got that set up but ran into a problem. I attached a screenshot to show the problem. I get only zeros for data in excel instead of the proper quote. I enabled the DDE in TWS like it says, i enabled macros in Excel to avoid some security problem, and have restarted both programs in different orders. Any suggestions?
Yes, it is true IB has a 100 symbol limit. It does not have to be a huge limitation though. My own work-around is to use QuoteTracker with built-in Trade-Ideas Pro (http://www.trade-ideas.com/). Best bang for the dollar. I then break up a 700 symbol list - around eighty or ninety stocks to a list. Before the market opens I backfill all the symbols by opening one list at a time. I found the backfill very slow with IB and figured it was a case of "you get what you pay for". Actually, it requires a configuration change to an XML file in IB TraderWorkstation. Specifically you modifying that entry in the element in TWS.XML like this: <apiSocketBufferSizes>500000</apiSocketBufferSizes> The default value is "0". It changes the backfill speed from a minute or five minutes to about 7 seconds a symbol. Then during the day as I become interested in one of those 700 equities I am really only having to backfill for just the day - it of course remains current after that point during the day. As I click on any symbol it populates all my charts with that symbol. The only quote list I operate during the day is one I start with that is totally blank. As I add symbols to the list based on my criteria they remain updated automatically for the day - I would never find 100 symbols any given day do track. More like 40 or so on above average volume, etc. Trade-Ideas will of course allow you to track everything right out of the box. I have confugured it to only track my own lists. Anyway, I tried zillions of combos and software programs - some costing me much more and have decided this is the best I can do and it seem unlikely I will find like better anytime soon. I am sure my methods will bring a laugh or two from the more experienced traders but at least I am now able to focus on my trading and not my workstation. NeoTicker was the best looking software but not as nimble as QuoteTraker. ZeroLine Trader was great but only if you trade a group of the same items each day as it seems to require you to setup each symbol or future in advance. MBTrading is a good broker and nice software but IB is hard to beat on price and is pretty good. I tried many other combos and installed countless programs and currently prefer the setup described above.