Problem with PC clock/timestamp

[pecas]

I'm using Tradestation 8.7 + Quotemanager to grab prices from Interactive brokers/eSignal.

I'm using an automated strategy and I have a partner that uses the same strategy.

Today, my PC didn't take a short trade on E-mini Dow jones, either with IB as data provider or with eSignal. The pattern my system was looking for was not there.

My partner took the trade with IB as a provider. The same system found that the pattern was there.

In the end, we found that Tradestation/quotemanager plot real time charts looking at PC clock, instead of tick timestamp transmitted by data providers, be it IB or eSignal. His candlestick was different from mine by one tick, and that was the difference. We found out that our PCs were out of sync for less than one second.

I would like to know if someone else thought to a solution to this problem. PC clocks are highly unreliable, and for now, the only thing I could do, was to change my windows registry to sync my clock with a time server once every 5 minutes. My partner did the same, but we verified that they consistently go out of sync even in 5 minutes, plus IB server seems one second ahead of our time server anyway.

 

[forker]

You shouldn't need to play with the registry. Look at the following commands

W32tm
Net time

 

[gc1]

I suggest you try a 3'rd party NTP client instead of relying on the built-in Windows programs which I think use SNTP and are likely to give a slightly less accurate clock.