Quote from cdcaveman:
Things make no sense cost wise for us small sized not hugely active options traders.. a lot of things that is
Quote from cdcaveman:
i was thinking .. in every entrepreneurial venture i've taken.. i had to be able to fix my own tools, my own truck , know a little to alot about everything.. or at every turn i was paying the mechanic or some other person money i didn't have to fix things while i sat their and waited... i think about ole crazy zucker facebook man.. trying to get someone else to program your app other then yourself is tough... people do it.. but sometimes especially when your starting out you have to do tons yourself... thats why i'm so gonna dig back into programming.. learn some visual basic and java.... i can't afford to pay for crazy expensive software to model reality in securities to see whats really going on and conceptualize what the market is doing.. off the shelf stuff just straight doesn't work that well.. i kinda believe that its not what everyone else is looking at that you will make money off of.. its what you can see that no one else is that you can get an edge with.. and standard tools indicators models etc.. don't give you any additional insight then anyone else has..
Quote from justrading:
From what I have read, the IB feed is filtered. Not a big deal unless tick data is significant in your calculations. Also, it does not provide Futures Options Chains.
I will have to look into Hoadley's suggestions in greater detail, and I will probably post what I find here.
Off the bat I can't see myself paying $12.99/contract base rate commissions to OptionsXpress when IB charges $0.85, nor can I see myself paying $250 in monthly fees to Barcharts to get the CME/CBOT/NYMEX feeds.
I'm looking to swing trade options, holding for days - weeks, not doing 20 contracts a day as it were, so I need to find something sensible that meets my needs.
Quote from comintel:
I have written API code to export option chains in the format required by Hoadley from another broker and platform (not IB), I am not offering the code but just mentioning that is feasible. Then I will be totally independent of commercial data providers.
Quote from TskTsk:
Future options are available in Excel from IB via DDE link...all instruments available in TWS are available in Excel....why cant you get them into Hoadley? proprietary stuff?
Quote from justrading:
Per explanation I got from Hoadley IB futures options chains are not provided in a format that his software can use. Barcharts, esignal, OptionsXpress work apparently. No idea why the difference.
Truth be told this whole thing seems unnecessarily complicated, but then computer related stuff is typically my way or the highway.
Quote from cdcaveman:
you can use the functions from the hoadley tool.. but the connectioning script you can't to get futures options? is this right that just means your going to have to dig into it yourself.. VB is not a hard language to learn AT ALL