MultiCharts / Interactive Brokers

Using IQ for data and IB for trades.
There were times times that when visually looking at the chart a trade should have filled but didn't. I had a couple of disconnects from the gateway as well. No matter what changes I made for routing, costs were all over the place. I was told by support that some of the trades had direct routing to which flat rate / non rebate commission are applied. Waiting for clarity on what if anything I can do to control that issue.

When comparing to MC at IB to TradeStation.
TradeStation felt more stable most of the time. There are times in fast moving markets where the response was slow to non existent. I had heard others say as a 32 bit software that can happen. TradeStation traded a bit more and has no trading costs. The benefits that IB offers are being able to trade with Bid/Ask data and the reports. Although today I did notice the cost report I created did not have the detail and reports that were to have been emailed automatically did not show up. Did not bother with following up on the report issue, maybe I will tomorrow. Could I live with MC,IQ,IB? Yes but I am not likely to go that way.

There is a 3rd party bridge for MultiCharts that will allow trading at TradeStation, this would allow me to potentially make use of Bid/Ask data from IQ to trade at TradeStation. Of course adding another piece of software to the puzzle is a potential problem. If there is a demo for the bridge I might give that a go this week.

BR
 
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BIG1RED9 said:
Using IQ for data and IB for trades.
There were times times that when visually looking at the chart a trade should have filled but didn't.
BR
More...
I'm sure you know this but others may not.
Some brokers back-fill their real-time charts. This means that when a trade is reported out of sequence, the chart is "corrected" after the fact. This, of course, is very bad for traders. These are trades you could not participate in. You will look at the chart and ask; why wasn't I filled? Well, if you look at the tick data you will see it never traded there.
As an aside. If you test with EOD data this will happen quite often also.
I have a day-trading reversal system that buys on a big drop. About once a month the backtest of a day will show a trade that should have filled and made a big profit but did'nt fill. Sure enough, if I look at the minute data, it never traded anywhere near my buy price. The daily data is incorrect in that it includes trades that are reported at a later time than they occure.
Oh well.
Testing with minute data solves that problem.
 
BIG1RED9. This is a nice thread. I used TradeStation many decades ago, but the very first thing I wanted to program could not be done. At least not without writing DLLs. I also have MultiCharts.net. I've never really used it. I use IB. I, and maybe others, would be interested In your final thoughts and conclusions when you solve your problems.
 
Thanks dholiday, I thought it might help others in the future, which is why I am documenting stuff. Most of my experience is with quicker short term trades for which I use tick data intrabar. In my perfect world if I am in and out of a trade in 1 second, I am a happy camper. I am beginning to consider longer term trading for stocks and for that it is good to know that minute works on daily bars. Use to be and based on what your saying is that historic data is manipulated. I remember collecting my own tick data in 2000i so I had data for backtesting. Back in the day when live data came via a plastic tee shaped antenna tape to a window, software was such a pain. So many bugs in operating systems, data, hardware and finally the charting software. It was a full time job staying on top of it all. Yes the capabilities of the early Omega Research products on the one hand were ground breaking, but so limited in doing what you wanted to try.
 
I have a demo of the software bridge that is suppose to allow me to use MC to trade at TS. That theoretically will allow me to use BID/ASK data and hopefully deal with the lack of TS platform responsiveness when the charts light up. I have another thread I started about TS reports, which issues need to be resolved as well to make the whole thing work.
 
I am being told by IB, that you can not trade using tiered commission when using a 3rd party platform. So bye bye IB.

Supervisor called wrong info.

You can not select a specific route. It must be smart routing for tiered.
 
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BigRed what U posted in this thread is correct: TS is a 32 bit software best for charting and strategy development. While IB is "the broker" with tons of mkts, algo, banking flexibility, currencies etc.

The execution at TS (on futures) is way worse than IB and this is mainly due to two reasons:

- missing executions algo. (unless U develop it)
- order stalling at TS server especially at key times such as opening and close of regular session. (server bog down)

This is based on extensive test I made years ago.

There is TS universal that basically give You the opportunity to use TS with IB but U get :

- more expensive commission
- IB data into TS which really make TS useless.


So this year I developed an extensive plugin (with a hell of couple of programmers) to execute my trades directly into IB . I have flexibility on everything algo, type of order, exchange choosing for stck, time etc etc. To an extent that is very complicated now. But really fast which cut my slippage of a great deal comparing to execute to TS. Moreover It doesn't require any TS code modification. But offer flexibility/speed/reliability that other bridges such as NJ are unable to provide.

It still require some further work but overall is ready. I thought to offer this plugin to other traders too but the problem I have is that I can't offer in the TS store for obvious reasons and I don't want to see it cracked by some droolers online .
 
My futures trading setup is MultiCharts using CQG through AMP. It has been basically flawless and great if not the lowest rates. But IB has the financial strength if traders went upside down big time. I wanted to diversify and have my funds insured which brought me back to stocks.

Sounds like you have been through a lot developing your connectivity.
 
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