Good luck with your analysis and comparison. I have no experience with TradeStation so I can't comment.
I am a bit fresher this morning. Had eye surgery, have slight double vision and my patience is thin. I apologize to Jerry for my tone, I realize he is taking time from his life to comment to help. I am just frustrated that I can't simply turn on what I know works and begin trading. Instead I am under the hood tinkering with crap that makes no sense in the real world and yet I know better because this is the real world. Better than when I started with System Writer, but still not perfect. I believe that if I create a 5 point chart or 50 tick chart using ASK data for data1, BID data for data2 using IQ I will get a different number of bars and therefore different entrance and exist signals, when using limit orders, then using IB. So if in one instance in the course of the day I have 500 bars with one, if I have 200 bars with the other, there is going to be a difference. Prior to this discussion, I would have expected charts being created using trade data to be the same. My many years of doing this tells me that if one is going to have a high trading frequency for tiny profits, differences can cause a train wreak. Having said that, I have no idea if it will work or not as I have found out one must verify with live trading to get the data, learn, adjust if possible and move on to the next test. First I am going to create new charts with 1 bar back so that the charts will build from the live stream. I will be building separate 1 tick bid, ask and trade charts using IB and IQ data. I will build a 1 tick TS chart using trade. At the end of the day I will get a total count, but may end it early if it is very clear. Next today while the market is closed, I will build both 5 point and 50 tick charts using IB BID and ASK data as well as a separate chart using only last. I will do the same for IQ and finally just a last for TS. Once the charts have enough bars built I will be in a position to trade IB or IQ live which I will do to see what issues if any surface. I will compare the chart built using TS data in MC, to the TS chart I will trade live using TS.
Above my abilities. I have considered getting an API connection to another broker but that is some serious $$.
Understood. I have a couple of clients who use QuantTerminal for equities. Would be curious to learn how it compares to Multicharts for your use case.
I just tried it and in MC you can create a symbol and select an ECN for the chart data. I have several going, ARCA, ISLAND a viable difference in the chart. So depending on what happens with the tests I have running, it might be viable (as an example) to select ARCA as the source of data from IQ and then map IB selecting on ARCA as the ECN to route the trades. No idea if selecting a single ECN is viable for trading, but a potability.
Several things to share. 1. IB TWS has an selectable order routing section. In my case I am going to try the setting for max rebates and see how the fills are. Huge difference in live captured data. I used AAPL and AAL in the test which ran for something more than an hour. This was a 1 tick chart. AAL IB ASK 3,016 Ticks IB BID 3,039 IQ ASK 12,400 IQ BID 12,390 IB LAST 2046 IQ LAST 6229 TS LAST 6229 AAPL IB ISLAND ASK 1,248 IQ ISLAND ASK 12,638 I am not going to try and trade on IB data. I can already see that the number of trades per day will be a fraction of my current trading at TS. So after the charts build from fresh streamed data, I will try IQ data trading to IB. I do not expect it to work at the level of TS, but I have been wrong so many times before.