I use Esignal and Ninjatrader for charts connected to IB. IB's charts have tons of features but arent easy on eyes....Cant beat IB for execution and price however
Hi Esignal provides historical data I cannot get from IB. Ninjatrader is free and has excellent charts. I use volume and tick charts in my system for setups and signals. IB on on intraday will not give you premarket data just starts when you open it up.......
- have 48 different commodities shown as individual charts and trade from them.
- for each contract, there would be 6 different charts showing different timeframes from 1 min Candlesticks to 5 Yr Daily.
- save and load trendlines made for any and all contracts in the fastest time possible (i called up IB's customer service and they say the only way to save trendlines is to save it as a general setting).
I'll try one more time with IB support on the phone, trying to do the trade as I speak to them. If that fails I don't see what more I can do besides close the account and move to another broker.
You really need 48 * 6 charts open? I use NinjaTrader and switching timeframes is so quick it would actually be slower to switch to another window the way you intend.
You can do it I'm sure but you need big screens, probably several, and a high performance PC, and a charting package to connect to IB TWS, because TWS charts are really poor quality, and I'm sure you can find a charting package that will let you work with trendlines the way you want.
So your mentor is going to spend a lot of money on hardware and software.
It's probably best to try out the hardware setup first with just two screens rather than splash out straight away for 6 or 8 screens.
The guy might not even like working with more than one screen. But then how else is he going to it? Finding the window you want amongst 48 others, especially if they are stacked up on the taskbar with abbreviated titles, wouldn't be easy on one normal screen.
Newbie mentoring with 4 large screens to accomodate 48 contracts??????
To me -my opinion- this would flash 48 warning lights and 4 sirens of 4 octaves each!
Sorry, just my opinion.
All the best
Hittfeld
We currently have 4 large screens so to accommodate the 48 contracts we need, though the problem with loading all those contracts at once is that it really slows the PC down. My PC runs on a Pentium 4 3.4 Ghz Processor and nearly 4 GB of RAM. But from what I'm told, even if we invest on a PC with a Quad Core Processor, it will still slow down because IB uses Java.
We used to have Ensign software to provide us with charts, but it's a pain to use because the charts are inaccurate and usually gives bad ticks - a lot. Metatrader is another, but the number of contracts we can get off it a so limited. Activetrades is the only broker I know that even provides Futures contracts.
This is my first post so, if I am posting in the wrong place or there are any other issues, please let me know.
The strategy that I’m testing at the moment is to trade US Options with entries and exits based on price action of the underlying Stock.
To achieve this I’ve been experimenting with the paper trading account and IB’s DDE API using conditional orders for both entry and bracketed exits (stop and profit).
I’ve watched the webinars, read the documentation, had some communication with API Support, and generally experimented a lot but it seems to be very much “1 step forward, 1 step back”. So, I’m hoping to benefit from some real world experience.
One of the hindrances to progress is that the US market is open when I should be sleeping, so I’ve just taken a subscription to ASX data so that testing can proceed during my proper waking hours.
Please bear with me as this is going to need the issues dealt with as they arise.
On Friday, I set up some test BUY trades and was watching the screen (Conditional Orders tab) when the condition changed to TRUE – instead of the order being processed (Transmit was set to 1) the Order Status changed to “Inactive” and stayed that way even though the market was open. And nothing happened in TWS.
The IB documentation is not very enlightening so, can anyone please give me some guidance as what may have caused this status of “Inactive”.
Graham
I'm suggesting you try NinjaTrader, it will probably do what you want, if that's what you really want to do. You download the trial version first and hook it up to IB TWS. You can get excellent help from their support forum.
Others might suggest other packages, but that's the one I know. Alternatively just google for "interactive brokers charting package". It won't matter that IB is Java if you use another package to hook up to it and run the charts.