i have a question about using sierra charts with IB ...... here is a quote from the sierrachart website ...... ''Sierra Chart does permanently store on your hard disk all intraday data received from this data feed. And this data is available for charting anytime.'' By permanently storing all intraday data on my hard drive , does this mean i will have to delete data everyday from the hard drive ? seems like i would because it would take up lots of space permanetly storing data there everyday. i have really have no clue what that means --- thats why i'm asking this question. thanks in advance
I have used a satellite data feed for several years. My hard drive is partitioned so about 3 gigabytes is for data. The most space the data ever took on this hard drive was about 40%. This was the collected data of about 15,000 stocks and 1,000 indices and 1,000 futuures symbols. I collected tick data on all these issues for 15 days each and end of day data for 2 1/2 years and 40% was the max space used. Now, I have just started collecting much less. I've cut down to about 5,000 stocks, 1,000 indices, and 1,000 or so futures symbols. This takes up just 20% of that 3 gigabytes. I've been collecting that data since about June or July but don't expect it will be much bigger next year at this time. I currently collect 8 days of ticks on futures symbols and 3 days of ticks on stocks.
bdixon , so what are you saying ..... that it doesnt really take up much space ? i dont know much about gigabytes and things like that ... LOL how often would you recommend going and erasing all the data stored on the comp ?
TKOtrader, Yes, that is what I am saying. You might want to purge your tick data after you have enough. Since, as I understand it, the IB TWS will only handle 40 tickers at a time that is the most intraday data you can collect. Depending on how big your hard drive is, if it is even just one gigabyte, you could probably collect a month's worth of data on 40 tickers and it would use maybe half of your space. What I would do and am doing is putting a limit on how much tick data I collect. It used to be 15 days on everything, then the 1st day was dropped as a new last day was added every day. After a while the disk space used stabilized around 40% and the only increase came through the end of day data increasing by one day every day for all those issues. That amounted to about a hundred kilobytes a day (100Kb) for 15,000 stocks plus the indices and futures. You'll just have to give it a try and see what happens. Of course if you don't need to collect data on 40 symbols then the disk space used will be quite a bit less.
In Sierra, click file, data source settings, on that page there's a box to check to auto move out the excess older data from large files. Ask questions here.http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SierraChartUsers/