IB and QuoteTracker

Coops - I agree with what you say. The combination of IB and Medved Quotetracker would be a great enhancement. Def sounds open to the idea - it's just a matter of IB and QuoteTracker working some technical issues out.

This is an e-mail I sent in August 2001 to Quotetracker inquiring about the possibility of IB and Quotetracker linking up. IB is receptive to working with Quotetracker if some technical issues can be resolved. Hopefully things have progressed where the technical issues can now be worked out. :)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

We would love to add them but would need their cooperation. We asked and thus far have not received it.

Mazel
2GK, Inc.
http://www.quotetracker.com

----- Original Message -----
From: @hotmail.com>
To: <Support@QuoteTracker.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 6:21 PM
Subject: Interactive Brokers and QuoteTracker


> Dear QuoteTracker:
>
> I have an account with Interactive Brokers. Are there plans to integrate
> QuoteTracker with Interactive Brokers ? Thanks.
>
> Sincerely,
>
>
 
If youre all serious about trading HOW CAN U USE QT for a primary software? I mean if it will lack volume AND it doesnt have multiday-intraday charts... Two of the most important features in my humble oppinion!!

Also caould someone please explain it to me why are the quotes in TWS important? I mean we are all using some othe charting package, isnt that where you primarily get your "info" about the issue? And base your trades on? I think , please correct me if wrong, that that is the most important thing.

NOw, if your order depends on quotes in IB system, thats another story... KI mean if the system treats it like the quotes are those on "his" system and executes against those and not the "real ones" at the excjhange... man, even I dont understand myself now:p Sorry English aint my mother tongue...

ALex
 
Customers should pay $10/month unless their monthly commissions exceed $30.

This will keep freeriders away. Even if someone opens an IB account just for the RTQ feed he/she has to pay the 10 dollars/month.

With the same amount of money you can subscribe to money.net which is a quasiRTQ but better than IB rtq feed.

Anyway, I strongly support the idea that IB and QTmedved should work closer and have QT incorporate the IB RTQ and trading platform too.

ajax

PS: after so many years I am still looking for the perfect broker.
 
Originally posted by neo_hr
If youre all serious about trading HOW CAN U USE QT for a primary software? I mean if it will lack volume AND it doesnt have multiday-intraday charts... Two of the most important features in my humble oppinion!!
More...

It all depends on your instruments, strategy, and point of view. If you trade index funds or futures, volume is not really relevant, and you will probably have resistance and support levels from the past few days in your head rather than messing around with multi-day intra-day charts.

However, I agree that multi-day support in QuoteTracker would be nice, and it should not be difficult to add.
 
We are looking at the API to integrate it. By the way, the quotes are missing HIGH/LOW as well as volume.

I cannot say that I am too crazy about the idea of having quotes without volume since many of the technical indicators and other features are dependent on it. We may have to track the volume ourselves (to be able to show T&S), but that would only show volume for the period where you were tracking the stock, which would probably create more confusion than it would solve.

You would not be able to use the chart backfill feature since the volumes would not match. OBV and other indicators would be busted. Vol %, VOL and related alerts would be useless. I have never seen anyone provide US quotes without VOLUME. Sigh.


Jerry Medved
http://www.quotetracker.com
 
I'm not sure, but I don't think it is possible to track volume accurately through IB's data feed, since it simply ignores all trades except the ones that happen to be last at the time (of the second) when IB sends out quotes.

Maybe it would be possible to program QuoteTracker to get volume data from a different, independently selectable data feed like Scottrade, or better yet, keep track of volume using IB quotes and adjust (correct) total volume whenever data from Scottrade (or whatever other source you select, could even be a delayed one) comes in.

Anywho, like I said, volume is not that meaningful for e-mini futures, so just the price chart would be fine. Same goes for indices.

Speaking of which, what would be really, really cool, was if you could display both the e-mini price quotes and the underlying index quotes that you get through IB in one intra-day chart.

But I'm getting carried away...
 
Getting volume from a different feed is not an option and would defeat the purpose anyway. If you had another datafeed, you would not need IB's.

As for 2 symbols on the same chart, can't do it right now, though there is a bit of a workaround. The new version supports translucent charts. You can open 2 charts, put one over the other and set the top one's translucency to about 50% so you can see both in the same space :)

Jerry
 
Wow, the man himself here:)

First of all, awesome software and you cant beat the price! Anyway, I just thought Id use the opportunity of asking the boss (Mr. Jerry Medved) why doesnt QT support multiday-intraday charting? Is that something that has to be payed to the providers separatly or is it a programming issue?

Thank you in advance (If you add that Im switching to your program ASAP)

All the best
Alex
 
We have been planning on implementing multi-day charts for a while, but there are a number of technical issues that complicate it.

1) Storage - QT keeps every tick for every stock you track in memory, which is how you are able to see all the inline charts and open so many intraday charts and have them update quickly. If we have multiple days worth of data, keeping everything in memory is no longer feasible. Would need to devise an alternate storage method. That is a big project in itself since it involves so many different subsystems in QT.

2) Charts - We would obviously not want to show the off hours on the chart. However, it is very difficult to determine what "off hours" means. Other software usually works with one datafeed, so they have very precisely defined active time for the data. QuoteTracker does not have that luxury. Some sources provide extended hours data. Others do not. We also support sources from lots of different exchanges, each having their own start/stop times. Some sources do not provide time on their date on their quotes.

3) Some datafeeds show the previous day's quote up until the first trade of the day. Others clear the data out and show zero volume well before the markets open, and yet other clear data on NASDAQ stocks, but not on NYSE. That really complicates things when you have to figure out where to put the quote. With one day quotes, we can guess, and then if the first quote comes in, quotes from the previous day or higher volume can get cleared out. If we are to keep multi-day quotes, we can no longer count on the data being cleared.

There are also some other issues. Basically, it is far more complicated than it looks specifically because QuoteTracker is not designed to work with one datafeed and every datafeed does things differently.

Jerry
 
1) I see the lack of database as the key roadblock for having multday intraday chart in QT. Have you folks consider using some lightweight free databases out there for data storage? Some of the APIs are easy to use that there isn't much difference in asssssing data in memory vs on disk. (ostore came to mind but it isn't free. Perhaps try the popular mysql. It is fast because it
does things in memory so it may not help you)

2) Hours cut off is a simple configuration problem which you can set up the default by data source and/or by user(depending on their trading style).

3) For when and how each day begin, you can set couple standard policies such as follow the closing of yday, or closing of extended hours or last trade of yday or first trade of day...

2) & 3) are dredge work but it is not a real issue for you capable
folks. 1) is a major issue since it ties to many pieces of QT.

Currently, if a user wants to display many intraday charts, the number of charts is limited by the resource of their computer and their bandwidth. Same can apply to multiday charts(memory is
cheap nowadays) and my guess is many of your users' machines can support a reasonable number of mday charts in memory. Once you convinced yourself this policy is reasonable(by experimenting on lower end machines to see how many mday charts can be done). Keeping the previous days data in dmp files and read the relevant data in memory on demand is not that bad.

Another alternative is to have data vendors supply the historic data(some do) so you only need to deal with the fact that some QT users are not going to be able to open that many multiday intraday charts. Frankly, it is very inefficient if the chart data is not in memory. You don't have much choice with this. That piece of historic data has to be either in memory as part of your database(yes, database does run in memory) or simply as part of QT.

The choice you have is to have better memory management so that when the chart is no longer needed, its memory can be released or reduce memory usage with compression.

A more permanent solution would be to have a database but it
is not critical for just the multiday charts. It may not be fast to
pull up a multiday chart due to disk access and the memory
usage problem doesn't go away by simply having a database
to store things.

Ed
 
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