I was wondering whether someone can shed some light into whether discretionary order submission via IB API can be customized. The website speaks of order execution "pads". What does that mean? I want to create buttons that buy or sell a dollar value of shares of stocks rather than having to enter the absolute number shares to buy or sell. Or can I customize buttons to flatten an existing position of a given stock? Does any such feature exist in tickblaze? I know it's not made for discretionary trading but the website mentions discretionary trading capabilities...
Tickblaze has two types of desktops, a Quant Desktop for backtesting and automated trading, and a Standard Desktop for manual / discretionary trading. In a Standard Desktop you can create as many workspaces as you like and inside those workspaces you can set up trading tools. One of those trading tools is a Trade Pad. The Trade Pad does have a built in button labeled 'Close' which will close / flatten the open position. You can't currently add a button or function to submit orders based on dollar value, but you can create a Trade Management Script that will trigger the moment you submit an order. You could program that Trade Management Script to accept a parameter for a dollar value and then have it modify the order that triggered the script to have a dollar value instead of the quantity that was set in the Trade Pad.
Thank you for chiming in. Does that trade management script, once chosen, then apply to all submitted orders? Do I understand correctly that this script triggers after the discretionary order is submitted on the frontend but before it is submitted to the broker?
Yes, the Trade Management script once chosen will apply to all orders submitted from that Trade Pad. The script triggers right after an order is submitted from the Trade Pad and before it's submitted to the broker, which means that it can modify the order before the broker ever receives it. Trade Management Strategy documentation Trade Management Strategy API functions Trade Management Strategy sample scripts
Thanks, that sounds interesting. I assume several different such trade management scripts can be written. My question would be, can any such script be easily chosen in a pulldown menu on the trade pad?
You can write as many Trade Management Strategy scripts as you like and then select them from the Trade Pad pulldown. Note that only one script can be selected at a time for each Trade Pad, but you can set up multiple Trade Pads in a workspace, and have each one configured with a different script (if you like).
That sounds very interesting, thank you, I will download and work with the community Edition to get a feel for it.