So, I made it a step further with this experiment today. In TS7, I set up an alert to trigger with every tick in a 1 tick ES chart, irrespective of bid or ask. I was somewhat floored by the experience of listening to the market trade. It has definite rhythms! I guess this is what many would use a squawk box for. I don't know why these rhythms were less aparent to me before, except that on the screen, I'm not aware of the minutia of order flow throughout the entire day. Basically, it was an aural representation of tick count. I was really blown away. There were several points throughout the day where I might have traded on what looked like a breakout without sound, but with an aural representation these were more easily identifiable as false starts. This may sound a bit silly, but the first rhythmic pattern to emerge repeatedly was most similar to what I believe is a "cha-cha" (and I may have this totally wrong... I'm not a dancer). During extreme runs on ES, I noticed a tendency for orders to cluster in a 1, 2-3-4 .... 1, 2-3-4 pattern. This happened throughout the day. Another prominent pattern was that higher velocity breakouts happened in more of a machine gun burst rhythm. Finally, there was plenty of noise. I hope that what I was hearing during saturated periods was indeed a market rhythm, and not just TS's quote server burping through the traffic. Any thoughts? I'm encouraged by this initial experience and want to take this several steps further. Specifically, I believe tgregg's idea about assigning separate tones to the bid and ask would add much depth. I was also thinking it would be beneficial to separate those tones between left and right speakers, buyers all on one side, and sellers on the other. I may post a recording of what I heard today to give others an idea. It really was enlightening. Logistically, I believe there are several ways to accomplish this. Since TS7 will only let you use one alert sound for all alerts, this would require a custom solution. Given my tools, I think my best bet would be a java application that receives price info from IB, and triggers wav files accordingly. Unfortunately I have little experience with java or the api, so I will be starting from the ground up on this. If anyone feels they can contribute, please do. It may take me a while to get this simple app written. Thanks very much everyone for sharing your ideas and anecdotes on this topic. Much appreciated. Sean
eSignal 7.3 does all that. With EFS (eSignal formula script) you can assign sound alerts (play any .wav file) to really any possible price, volume, or analytic study condition. Running multiple EFS files, you can make your computer chime, beep, honk, ring, toot, bark, or whatever, all in chorus; make it as cacophonous as you want.
Awesome, maybe i should switch. the ultimate goal is to assign one note from a scale to every price level, and the scale would be recalibrated every day on the opening price, and run in a 1 tick chart. I should get an esignal trial, and check this out. Thanks very much.
Hmmm, maybe left or right speakers if some eMA is moving up or down (or some other trend determination). . . And a special wave for new HoD or LoD.
Actually, this is great, I just learned that TS7 can call upon as many custom sound files as you like, which means I will have this completed in a few hours. Tomorrow will be cool. You use the function "playsound". ex from the user guide: Condition1 = (PlaySound("c:\sounds\Thatsabuy.wav")) If LastBarOnChart AND Low < Low[1] AND Close > High[1] Then condition1 = true; If there are any musicians out there, I would appreciate your thoughts on this. I am torn between using a chromatic scale, vs a C major scale (remember this is for ES which trades in .25 increments). Whereas melodies in a C major scale will likely be easier to memorize and follow, it will also exadurate and contort the distance between pitches relative to price increments, and run up the keyboard faster. A chromatic scale will have reltative mathmatical proportion to the price level, but probably be much more difficult to listen to and memorize. I suppose I will try both. It will take a while to record all those notes.. I believe I'll start with a simple two tone left/right bid/ask arrangement. Another option is to take selected intervals from a C major scale. Since there are three levels separating each whole number, perhaps 1-3-5-6, but that would be an octave per point - quite unlistenable during major rallies.
you have to record a stereo wav that's fully panned left, and one that's fully panned right. last night i wrote all the EL to assign a full keyboard of pitches to every level, but realized there's no way my pc is gonna process all 200 lines of EL on every tick. so, this morning, i'm using your idea of a simple left-panned high tone on ask and right-panned low tone on bid. it sounds great. i recommend making the wavs as short as possible, and saving them as 8 bit files.
I dont know how well screen reading software works on an order entry system like TWS. If that didn't work a person could program a command line interface for TWS and create hook for text based output which would be read aloud by software. It would be a significant programming task, but do-able.