I've just loaded it. I was already a fan of MultiCharts, warts and all. But the warts are now gone, and now I'm in love. What was a thoughtfully designed but lumbering platform is now as fast as anything I've experienced anywhere. The MC team has coded it to take full advantage of multiple cores -- including optimization. The PowerLanguage editor is one slick piece of software engineering as well. Great stuff. Sorry to palaver here, but I'm so thrilled, I can hardly stand it. Anyone else tried this latest edition?
I haven't looked at the beta but I'm moving towards MC for autoexec. I beta tested other software from the same people years ago. I was really impressed with how well it worked in the beta stage. That gives me confidence that they have the skills for the job. I have a new mobo and dual core waiting to go in a box and the current hardware is starting to fail, time to rebuild the machine and grab the Multicharts beta probably.
I wonder if we have the same software. half my Studies have not worked since two versions ago (ones that draw lines). The last version fixed this but broke other stuff. There are loads of bugs that vary from simply irritating to actually putting money at risk. Acknowledged (and severe) bugs take weeks or even months to fix. As for speed it is still slow and cumbersome. Try neoticker it is light years ahead in speed (100-100 times for most stuff) and stability. Drawing tools are lousy seriously lousy. Backtesting and optomization are bugged (not that I use those features). Thats academic as you can not manage data properly to prepare for backtest (support for multiple sessions borked, no holidays, no bad tick filtering etc.) I still have hopes for MC but it is just not a professional level tool. I just can't see it cathing up with products like Neoticker or Ensign. Actually I'd just settle for a feature freeze and all the bugs being fixed. I am really genuinely pleased you are happy with it but I do wonder what sort of work you are doing with MC? I'm not really doing anything that sophisticated and uncover all sorts of issues on a daily basis.
http://forum.tssupport.com/viewtopic.php?t=3983&sid=e9b33e288097f5f35ad384e4a9ed252c Dangerous Bug in Autotrading PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 5:50 am Post subject: Dangerous Bug in Autotrading Multicharts should only allow autotrading on the last bar. Lets say I turn on multicharts at 1:00pm. The chart starts downloading data and updates the chart bar by bar. Multicharts then sees that there was a signal at 10:00 am and it places the order on IB. This is a big problem because it's currently 1:00pm already. This problem will also occur if Multicharts loses connection with the data provider during the day, and the chart refreshes itself. Please do not let Multicharts do this. Thanks.
this same situation exists with tradestation for many years. You have to put the expression "if lastbaronchart" in your code, then it will only act on the last bar of the chart. Whether it will act exactly the same as it would in realtime with tick by tick updating can be in question but your code won't place trades on history bars. Regarding the previous post regarding drawing tools and bugs, I have found some buggy behavior, not enough to stop the show, and I found that the trendline drawing tool is a lot better than with Tradestation, same goes for scrolling through charts, I can use the mouse and keyboard arrows together and navigate charts very nicely with MC, it's a plus in strategy development. I'm greatly preferring MC to TS nowadays and MC is probably going to improve much faster than TS. MC 2.2 is going to have some code that can be added to an indicator for autotrading, that is my preferred method for a long time now and I have had struggles with every third party dll on the planet so far... I'm looking at the idea of porting everything to C# and going with NinjaTrader too. I had a C class decades ago, pretty much found out at that time how much I hated programming, then I started programming Tradestation in 2000 and have been hating programming ever since, might as well hate it in C# since I find that all the "ease and convenience" of a high level language is horribly debilitating much of the time....
I, too, wonder if we're running the same software. I use MC's drawing tools extensively, often during the market session itself, "on the fly". No problems here. I run 10 MC workspaces simultaneously. This involves an aggregate of several hundred symbols (almost all of them "hidden") as data grist for some enormously processor-intenstive market breadth studies that have required serious EasyLanguage jutjitsu to pull off. Now, whether these studies are remotely necessary is open to question. What is not is MultiChart's continued ability to handle whatever I throw at it, without missing a hitch. Don't know what else to say. I've been beating the shit out of this program since the evening I started this tread. It has yet to let me down. I remain thoroughly impressed.
I just briefly looked at MultiCharts today and found a bug within the first few minutes and then didn't bother continuing. Take a monthly chart and draw an extending trendline that touches price at a few points. Switch the same chart down to weekly and then daily. Notice that the trendline does not touch price at the same points on the weekly and daily as it does on the monthly. It looks like they still have a way to go before I will consider MultiCharts. The charts do look nice though.
I can run an indicator in tradestation with dll calls to trade with IB, the same script does not run from Multicharts so far. I'm changing to trying to trade with one of MC's strategies but it won't do an intrabarorder or a limit order either, so I have to run it on a tick chart and generate the bars in arrays and use all market orders... I'm not totally enthused at this point but with ver. 2.2 they are supposed to have a script enhancement that will allow trading from the indicator, which is exactly what I want, if they put all the right functions it. Regarding the abovementioned trendline problem, Tradestation does not work like what the poster expects either. I drew a tl on a monthly chart and it does not even touch the bars anywhere on the weekly chart.
Dear ToTrade, I'm running MultiCharts 928.1050 and coudn't see th problem. Please see attached. Maybe you are running an out-dated version?