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At 05:31 AM 3/5/2004, jbclem1 wrote:
>It sounds like TS7 has it's own version of OnDemand Server. How long does
>it take to bring up a chart each time? I'm finding the one I have (from RT
>Soft) is a bit problematic...I have symbols that some days just won't work
>realtime even though their backfill works. And I've had days when the
>backfill doesn't work so when you open up a chart, or a new symbol, the real
>time portion will start forming bars and the non working backfill(history
>data) leaves a gap from the beginning of trading hours to the point where
>the real time bars are forming.
There are no such problems. It is an on-demand server. Charts for new symbols come up pretty quickly. All data you use is stored locally on your drive in a cache directory. For each symbol there are separate files - one each for tick, minute, and end-of-day data on each symbol.
When you log-on, any missing data is retrieved and the complete chart is drawn. The time depends upon how much data it has to download to draw the chart. Daily charts take a few seconds on a new symbol. A 100 tick chart can take a 10 to 20 seconds to minutes if it has to download lots of tick data. If you are asking for a lot of tick data, it will ask you if you want to wait now or schedule the download after market hours.
During the day, you sometimes get periods of a few seconds when the charts stop updating. It may be server congestion or Internet issues, I cannot tell which. It can be real annoying if it occurs just about when you wanted to enter a trade but it has not been a major issue.
You can work off-line with the data you have in your cache for system development, backtesting, etc. I usually have one machine on-line and one off-line for development. Only one machine can be on-line at a time but you can have copies of the application on any number of machines. You can load of the development machine with the data you need by logging off the on-line machine, logging on temporarily at development machine to load up the data you need.
Occasionally, perhaps after a stock split, you will see a discontinuous chart if the split adjustment didn't work correctly. In that case you can simply type "Control R" to reload all the data in the cache for that chart. It usually takes seconds.
A major issue for me is that they do not automatically adjust mutual fund prices for distributions, which make the mutual fund data essentially useless, so I have to keep TS2000i and DialData around for mutual fund data.
>You're so right, I would much prefer to spend my time trading. Is TS7
>working perfectly? Are there no problems with it.
Have you ever seen any software that works perfectly? That said, it is now working better than TS2000i and has a lot of new features that are very useful.
>Are you able to scan for trading setups like you could with Radar Screen?
I like RadarScreen but it is not what I expected. Each row is like a single-symbol chart and each column corresponds to single indicator on each of the row. So if you applied the RSI indicator to a RadarScreen window, each row correspond to symbols and one column would correspond to the current value of RSI for each symbol. That is not very useful, obviously. To make it useful, you need to include decision logic in the indicator and have it color the RadarScreen cell a color such as red for going down, green for going up, yellow for in congestion region, etc.
It only provides data for the symbols in that RadarScreen window so it is not a tool to scan through all stocks for some screening criteria. It works best for showing you which stocks from the subset in the window, are worth looking at in detail.
You can have only one data series per row so you cannot refer to data1, data2, etc. - there is just data1. But you can use global variables to allow an indicator to refer to other data series if you are clever. They supply a couple of global variable add-ons for free on the support site.
You can also use global variables to combine the results of several rows into an overall summary such as a portfolio with some programming effort.
>Have the Cruz brothers finally put together something that's really good?
I am surprised to be able to say "a lot better than I expected". The new version has lots of improvements over TS2000i.
There are a few annoying things such as divide-by-zero or square-root-of negative errors that pop up occasionally in the built-in functions. Most users will probably not encounter but you might if you are doing complex arithmetic.
There are better debugging tools such as breakpoints that help a lot but they could be improved.
They still do not do a very good job of getting you to be an effective user. There are lots of nice features buried in there and I keep discovering them little by little. The users group message system is web-based and has jillions of messages which you never would have time to read and there is little in the way of indexing or effective searching so I find it of limited use. Perhaps I haven't learned to use it (but why should I have to learn yet another messaging system...).
I have always been a critic of Omega's sloppy software development processes but they seemed to have gotten the religion, finally. New releases are pretty well tested before they are released.
I am now using TradeStation to trade futures. I get very fast fills on market orders. The TradeManager functions let you see everything you need and copy/paste to Excel. This weekend I tried downloading all my orders since June, copied and pasted them into Excel and checked them. They were perfect - no errors or missing trades on hundreds of trades. (Their monthly statements were not as accurate.) They also answer the phone quickly and fix things, (usually my mistakes) quickly (moving trades to the correct account, etc.) The same things are available in securities accounts but I haven't any experience with them.
They still have different accounts for futures and securities which is a bit of a pain so you have to wire funds from one to the other. But all-in-all it works very well. I plan to try their automated order entry capability from a TradeStation strategy soon. EasyLanguage now has lots of new functions to check account positions, balances, etc.
So in summary, it is not perfect but good enough on balance to satisfy my needs.
Bob Fulks
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