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Multicharts User Thread
- Thread starter GaryN
- Start date
I am testing this software at the moment and will write a preliminary report now:
First of all this software has big potential - congratulations. Here are my findings:
1. As discussed above one of the biggest weaknesses is the time it takes to load the charts. Many systematic oriented traders want to use their own historical adjusted ascii database and want Multicharts/esignal only to update the last day with realtime data. However sometimes ticks get lost from esignal and one has to reload the chart to fill the loast ticks and when you run 20 charts then it takes forever and is not suitable for real trading. My suggestions are:
Lets suppose itâs the 01st February of 2008 and we have a chart that consists of 5 minute ascii data of the whole year 2007 and up to end of january mixed together with esignal 5 minute data for the day of 01st of February then the following should happen:
a. The loading of ascii data together with esignal data must be as fast as in TS2000i (minimum !!) -
b. When user misses data in the part of the data that is loaded from esignal then the ascii part should not reload again !!! and only the esignal part of the chart should reload from esignal. This is important because the historical data stays the same anyways and does not need to be reloaded ! Only the newest real time data (in my case the current day always) needs to be "fixed" or reloaded sometimes. The number of days or bars or times that i want esignal to reoad should be flexible and user should be able to determine it. A little bit like Dynaloader with TS2000i but better because not the whole chart is re-loaded. There should be a reload button that I press and all selected symbols re-load the current day (or even better only last hour because data before was already reloaded before maybe) only !! That should be fast and efficient.
2. The software needs a very good tracking window that is also fast !!! It must show all open positions for each chart and system... and in addition it must show "aggregate positions" - This is important for systematic traders. Lets imagine one trades 10 systems on E-minis - then some systems are long and some are short and the positions change constantly. Then its very difficult for the trader to keep track of the whole e-mini position. This is a huge drawback in TS2000i. So please add a feature that shows aggregate positions for each market.
3. The speed of real time chart loading, Tracking, updating etc is a lot lot more important than optimization speed. A guy who optimizes 30 variables over 10 years of data has the wrong system anyways and is just curve fitting - trust me on that one.
If you manage to get the above done - i bet you you get 80 % of all old time TS2000i users because they run more and more into trouble and are looking for alternatives. TS2000i has problems with dual core , with vista and will have more problems as time goes by. Me alone i would buy 10 licenses minimum if you get the above really fixed
Good luck and i will post more as i test more
First of all this software has big potential - congratulations. Here are my findings:
1. As discussed above one of the biggest weaknesses is the time it takes to load the charts. Many systematic oriented traders want to use their own historical adjusted ascii database and want Multicharts/esignal only to update the last day with realtime data. However sometimes ticks get lost from esignal and one has to reload the chart to fill the loast ticks and when you run 20 charts then it takes forever and is not suitable for real trading. My suggestions are:
Lets suppose itâs the 01st February of 2008 and we have a chart that consists of 5 minute ascii data of the whole year 2007 and up to end of january mixed together with esignal 5 minute data for the day of 01st of February then the following should happen:
a. The loading of ascii data together with esignal data must be as fast as in TS2000i (minimum !!) -
b. When user misses data in the part of the data that is loaded from esignal then the ascii part should not reload again !!! and only the esignal part of the chart should reload from esignal. This is important because the historical data stays the same anyways and does not need to be reloaded ! Only the newest real time data (in my case the current day always) needs to be "fixed" or reloaded sometimes. The number of days or bars or times that i want esignal to reoad should be flexible and user should be able to determine it. A little bit like Dynaloader with TS2000i but better because not the whole chart is re-loaded. There should be a reload button that I press and all selected symbols re-load the current day (or even better only last hour because data before was already reloaded before maybe) only !! That should be fast and efficient.
2. The software needs a very good tracking window that is also fast !!! It must show all open positions for each chart and system... and in addition it must show "aggregate positions" - This is important for systematic traders. Lets imagine one trades 10 systems on E-minis - then some systems are long and some are short and the positions change constantly. Then its very difficult for the trader to keep track of the whole e-mini position. This is a huge drawback in TS2000i. So please add a feature that shows aggregate positions for each market.
3. The speed of real time chart loading, Tracking, updating etc is a lot lot more important than optimization speed. A guy who optimizes 30 variables over 10 years of data has the wrong system anyways and is just curve fitting - trust me on that one.
If you manage to get the above done - i bet you you get 80 % of all old time TS2000i users because they run more and more into trouble and are looking for alternatives. TS2000i has problems with dual core , with vista and will have more problems as time goes by. Me alone i would buy 10 licenses minimum if you get the above really fixed
Good luck and i will post more as i test more
I agree 100% with trillennium. We are pretty much in the same situation and would move away from TS if there was a better alternative. Right now, Multicharts is not but it definitely has the potential to be if the above mentioned topics would be considered my Multicharts programmers. Hope they read this.
I downloaded multicharts.exe. It ran, and complained that 'multicharts.exe' was running, and close it first. I renamed the installer to mc.exe, and the install went smoothly. When I manage datasources, nothing happens when I click Settings for eSignal-- IB, and PATS are ok. I went to the forum, there is no way to get a username, password to log on.
However sometimes ticks get lost from esignal and one has to reload the chart to fill the loast ticks and when you run 20 charts then it takes forever
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Could you please explain why?
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Lets say at the end of the day you look at your 5 min chart and you had a couple of buy and sell signals. Then you close the chart and reload it ... then the chart gets the data from the esignal server. However many times when you do that, some buy and sell signals changed or dissappeared alltogether. That is because when markets are busy ticks get lost on the way from esignal to your chart. e.g. The high at 5:00pm is suddenly different etc etc. So you have something that we call "disappearing trade". That is very annoying and we catch it when we constantly reload the chart (we do with dynaloader in TS2000i).
Does anybody out there confirm what i am saying and that its important ?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Could you please explain why?
----------------------------------------------------
Lets say at the end of the day you look at your 5 min chart and you had a couple of buy and sell signals. Then you close the chart and reload it ... then the chart gets the data from the esignal server. However many times when you do that, some buy and sell signals changed or dissappeared alltogether. That is because when markets are busy ticks get lost on the way from esignal to your chart. e.g. The high at 5:00pm is suddenly different etc etc. So you have something that we call "disappearing trade". That is very annoying and we catch it when we constantly reload the chart (we do with dynaloader in TS2000i).
Does anybody out there confirm what i am saying and that its important ?
Quote from etherboy:
I downloaded the trial version and found one thing is very, very annoying -- the last price color keeps changing between up, down & wick colors. I don't even know which one to look after.
It confuses end users since last price keeps move between other indicators' price, and these indicators has their own colors too.
If users don't like the way last price color is displayed, they should be able to choose a fixed color, since the bar chart colors already let users know the price is up or down.
Actually, what I'm wondering is, how one can turn off price updating on the y-axis.
I've used MultiCharts for about 4 years now and have had my share of problems but being a professional trader I am proactive as to ward off potential problems. I upgrade my computer yearly and cost justify it as a cost of doing business. Since I moved to a Duad Core 6700 overclocked, Win XP Pro x64 OS, 4 gig of Ram and a QID Quad video card my problems had greatly decreased. This spring I will be upgrading my internet from a 2 mg up/down WAN to a dedicated fiber at 10+ up/down. Will data hiccups diminish, absolutely. They already did from my old WAN to the new one. I'm an extreme user though. I usually have 80 charts open intraday and review over 900 different charts on the weekends.
There are many different charting packages out there and what is important becomes what each person REQUIRES for their own specific applications. It is nearly impossible to compare packages because of individual priorities.
My priorities are Constant Volume Bar charts (CVB) and their accuracy, data integrity, lack of latency of data and finally anxiously waiting for the Radarscreen/Quote page that has been promised to me since 2006. (I know they are working on it).
One of the only other things I would love to see is when the session break occurs (usually midnight) where ever the last bar of a Constant Volume Bar chart finishes, the next bar (first bar of next day) should begin where the last bar ended.
EXAMPLE:
3000 CVB chart (Constant Volume Bar chart)
Last bar of day = 529 contacts on that bar
First bar of following day = 2471 contracts on that bar, then each following bar would return to the user defined 3000 CVB's.
I know it can be done because I know a few programmers that have created this scenerio inside of their own trading environments. My personal feeling is that, if you are going to offer a CVB charts, make sure their are as perfectly accurate as they can possibly be.
There are many different charting packages out there and what is important becomes what each person REQUIRES for their own specific applications. It is nearly impossible to compare packages because of individual priorities.
My priorities are Constant Volume Bar charts (CVB) and their accuracy, data integrity, lack of latency of data and finally anxiously waiting for the Radarscreen/Quote page that has been promised to me since 2006. (I know they are working on it).
One of the only other things I would love to see is when the session break occurs (usually midnight) where ever the last bar of a Constant Volume Bar chart finishes, the next bar (first bar of next day) should begin where the last bar ended.
EXAMPLE:
3000 CVB chart (Constant Volume Bar chart)
Last bar of day = 529 contacts on that bar
First bar of following day = 2471 contracts on that bar, then each following bar would return to the user defined 3000 CVB's.
I know it can be done because I know a few programmers that have created this scenerio inside of their own trading environments. My personal feeling is that, if you are going to offer a CVB charts, make sure their are as perfectly accurate as they can possibly be.