Thanks for the feedback. I meant "A". I am aware that IB doesn't deliver true "tick-by-tick" information. My reference is to the data that IB does deliver. The bars/candlesticks update with each price change. The one-day one-minute line charts do not. Much thanks in advance if you can finally get this corrected!
I am using 848.8. I was not aware of a simple Macd. Well damn. I had not checked this upgrade. It was not there before! This is fine the ability to change between simple and expon. is just fine. I would like to make the MACD slow line dots though. Maybe some dots or dash option for the slow lines---instead of plane lines. By second login, I was referring to what someone told me at IB (I think Def?). I was under the impression that each account would be able to login 2 times eventually. So we could run TWS on two separate computers (like a laptop and a desktop) at the same time.
IBsoft, One thing that you need for the charts is a way to adjust the bar spacing and it would be nice to be able to scroll as well. For instance, if you pull up a one week chart 30 min on USDJPY it will be scrunched up unless I expand the chart across my whole 19 inch monitor. Do you understand what I am saying?
Well this is not exactly what API traders want. We want to have a GUI and a separate core logic because API traders just don't need TWS GUI (and maybe they also don't like it who knows...) So if there could be a way to just launch the "core logic" without using CPU cycles and memory for the GUI that would be fine.
In principle I agree, but one needs to take a practical aproach which is to pressure IB to fix whatever issues there are in TWS/server side reliability. I havn't seen any issues with the basic GUI features of TWS that in my view contribute to unreliability. CPU utililization is a non issue. Unless you have a lot of market data lines, TWS CPU utilization is negligable. I'm running TWS with API connected app at the moment. About 10 TWS market data lines (DAX, ESTX50, HSI etc). With TWS minimised CPU utilization is less than 0.5 %. (Linux / Athlon Socket A 2800 with bbout 50 instruments monitored by the API connect app). TWS CPU utilisation really is not an issue. Of course if you use book trader etc etc, things will be different. Memory use is barely an issue. If 50 Mbyte is an issue then buy some more memory. My guess is that sometime in the future, IB may drop or reduce the charge for FIX and the streaming market data module that I saw mentioned recently. Just guessing, but I wouln't be surprised if the streaming market data module code is just stripped out of TWS into a separate process, so in all likelyhood not anything new at all.
>> I assume the reason IB says no is because of the FIX API...Providing a lighter TWS API-only version would maybe "kill" their FIX market or at least lower their revenue on this side... A lighter TWS could be done that way : On the login screen (and in the INI file) provide a checkbox that allows to launch or not launch the GUI. If not launched TWS would be used to accept API entries and be minimized in the right side of the taskbar (the TWS icon color would change to green/red depending on connectivity issue or not, there should be a way also to know when an order is launched or not, maybe a small animation on the TWS icon when an order is received and when an order is executed). If launched this is the classical TWS GUI (that would be the default choice). How hard is it to code that ?
But what have you gained ? What problem are you solving ? Not CPU utilization and not memory utilization, because they really aren't issues. If 'light' is a virtue, and I agree in general it is a good thing, you want no TWS at all and no local intermediary server. The application binds or links to the API lib which connects directly to the the IB servers. In the best of worlds I would much prefer this. But I can't see this happening, if for no other reason that IB don't want to provide complex protocol handlers in several languages. I can see their point of view. So if no TWS is not an option at least in immediate future, what's to be gained by separating an API server and TWS GUI ? I presume you are suggesting they run in different processes. If you want both running either they both connect to the backend servers introducing extra load on the backend, or they communicate with each other introducing extra complexity. You now have more code rather than less code. From their attention to this board, it certainly seems that IB wants to resolve TWS issues. From my point of view I would far rather see this than them persue some other course that I remain unconvinced solves any practical probelm at all.
New IB charts. I got an email that the new IB charts, beta were ready for download. I could not make them work. some dll missing. Would like to know if anyone else has tried these new charts. Thanks Keith