Try reducing the chart load size to about 500 during market hours and turn off "recalculate expert live" to speed things up considerably. Do your testing after hours.
Hi Tech Analysis, I cannot agree more fully with your statement. Can I ask you how you use Metastock for RT charting? Do you have a regular hookup to one of the compatible quote vendors or did you manage to feed your own RT stream into it (coming from another program). I used to be able to do this with an earlier version of Metastock but have not tried this for a few years now as my former home-solution did no longer work with the later versions. nononsense
I used to use esignal's data feed, but now I'm using a utility called MetaServer RT that allows Metastock to use IB's streaming quotes. I have a 3-monitor layout of daily, 5- and 30-minute charts. Setting the x-axis scales is easy - until you need to make changes. It ignores them, sometimes it works, sometimes not. There's no rhyme or reason. Often times it's easier to just create a new chart than make changes to an existing one. The backtester is OK, but when you have a results panel you have to close it if you want to view a chart (or put the chart on another monitor. This is assinine. This whole damn thing just has the feeling of an app that was written by corporate suits who have no clue what the active trader really wants or needs. If I didn't pay so much for it I'd flush it down the crapper where it belongs.
Anyone thinking of using investor RT PLEASE take the time to read thru the discussion board. The are still having issues with errors they had two years ago. I encourage you to read thru some of these, go back several years and see for yourself. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linnsoft/
All of your advise here is very helpful. Yesterday I spent the entire afternoon with Tradestation trying to get it to sound an alert when the price crosses a moving average. I didn't succeed. In about 3 minutes this morning I set the same alert with Ensign. In about an hour I had alerts set for my entire trading system. It'll take me a lot lot longer to program it and have it send orders but at least I have something to start with right away. I still haven't ruled Tradestation out yet but there are other problems that I have with it. I like their brokerage and commissions but they don't have an office in Canada. I was told they wouldn't accept Canadian accounts but someone said that they would?
You think that's bad try those overpriced plug-ins at 295.00 a pop. I tried them all out on a broker's office machine and some of them, Murphy's and Nisons come to mind - are truly pathetic. I wouldn't give 295.00 for the entire lot of them.
Nobody here is looking at the most important feature in a software and that is portfolio testing. The seminars that I went to and the books I read made this very clear. So TS is only an option in combination with RINA. I went to take a look at the combination at a friends place and it is slow and crashed before we could see the result of a 45 minute simple test run. So the guy who showed it to me told me that it happens quite regularly. Is TS adding this feature soon?
Another gripe with Metastock is with a 15-chart R/T layout open it pegs my CPU at close to 100%. As soon as I find something to replace it I'm taking this bloated piece of crap off my system.