IB TWS Charts

[kowboy]

Quote from j1900q:

It sure seems like IB could do better than this as far as a charting program. They evrything else so well.
Keith

Quote from stock777:

There's an option to live update, no?

IB charts only auto refresh on the one day or shorter time intervals.

So if you have a two day chart open, you must manually refresh the chart. Quite annoying.

Also the borders and margins are way too big and take up too much monitor screen real estate.

Also some of the chart studies (bolinger bands and volume) do not keep up in real time and need to be refreshed manually.

 

[BSAM]

Quote from kowboy:

IB charts only auto refresh on the one day or shorter time intervals.

So if you have a two day chart open, you must manually refresh the chart. Quite annoying.

Also the borders and margins are way too big and take up too much monitor screen real estate.

Also some of the chart studies (bolinger bands and volume) do not keep up in real time and need to be refreshed manually.

Kowboy.....

Using a 1 minute or a 5 minute chart, switch from a candle chart to a line chart. Candle charts do update the candles by each "last price". A line chart will not. Strange.

 

[stock777]

Speaking of annoyances.

How come the backfill does not work for after hours prints. If you call up a stock at 5pm, you get none of the trades between 4pm and 5 pm. Not good.

 

[Cdntrader]

Quote from stock777:

Speaking of annoyances.

How come the backfill does not work for after hours prints. If you call up a stock at 5pm, you get none of the trades between 4pm and 5 pm. Not good.

you probably are charting a "smart" symbol. You need to specify the exchange to get afterhours. Try using the "island ecn" symbol.

works 4 me.

 

[stock777]

Actually, Im getting backfill via Quotetracker. I wonder if they are using SMART instead of ISLD, causing the problem.

 

[mhashe]

Quote from dcraig:

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I have a suggestion to IB that I think they should seriously consider. It is this. Approach the author(s) of jfreechart with a view to retaining them as consultant(s). They could provide consultancy to IB's own developers, which would no doubt speed up development of TWS charting. They could also provide enhancements to the jfreechart library in areas where it is deficient for this type of real time chart.

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Good suggestion but that is unlikely to happen. IB programmers will be dead-set against such a move since it will prove to management how incompetent their programmers are.

 

[stock777]

Quote from mhashe:

Good suggestion but that is unlikely to happen. IB programmers will be dead-set against such a move since it will prove to management how incompetent their programmers are.

Let me guess. You're NOT a programmer.

 

[dcraig]

Quote from mhashe:

Good suggestion but that is unlikely to happen. IB programmers will be dead-set against such a move since it will prove to management how incompetent their programmers are.

I'm not so sure about this. If I was working on the TWS charts, I'd welcome active support from the developers of jfreechart. I doubt if it's a case of job preservation either. I expect IB has plenty of other work in the pipeline for their developers.

The point I'm trying to make is that is that IB really need to get onboard with the jfreechart people to provide the enhancements to the library that are definitely needed for this type of application. Of course this may already be happening but reading between the lines I suspect not. My guess is that IB have been hacking at quite an old version of jfreechart to provide necessary features and performance. They are using 0.9.15 which is old. I'm using 0.9.20 which is also significantly out of date but much newer.

I'd also like to point out that jfreechart is licensed under the GPL licence so any change made by IB to the library must be made available in source code form to anybody that wants them. So there is no issue of protecting confidential code. In this context, they should be engaging with the jfreechart project so that this stuff gets into the jfreechart code base. Otherwise they will end up with the problem of retrofitting code changes to new versions of jfreechart for ever and ever. As I said before, everybody wins.

I may be well off base with this post and it may all be happening already. If so, that is excellent.

 

[def]

Quote from mhashe:

Good suggestion but that is unlikely to happen. IB programmers will be dead-set against such a move since it will prove to management how incompetent their programmers are.

As someone on the management side of the equation, I'd like to point out that the same people you are insulting have developed a system that is often effortlessly handling over 400,000 trades per day around the world. Maybe our programmers haven't created the most aesthetically pleasing code in the world but they sure have done a great job with what is most important.

 

[stock777]

Quote from def:

As someone on the management side of the equation, I'd like to point out that the same people you are insulting have developed a system that is often effortlessly handling over 400,000 trades per day around the world. Maybe our programmers haven't created the most aesthetically pleasing code in the world but they sure have done a great job with what is most important.

As I said, the unwarranted criticism reeks of coming from someone that does not program, never has, and never will.

I've been with IB since the OLD non java version. I have never felt that the programming was shoddy, and while I have had had issues like everyone else, the feature to bug ratio is quite high.