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Strategies & Market Trends : E-Mini Pit

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To: Ramus who wrote (5588)8/21/2002 6:02:09 AM
From: Atin  Read Replies (1) of 11288
 
IB's API is based on a polling mechanism that makes you poll about 1/sec to get data. So it misses trades and any charts based on this data will be incomplete unlike say eSignal that sends you all trades. You will notice this sometimes even in the IB TWS Workstation when prices get "skipped". The API will also not send "duplicate" trades that happen at the same price so volume calculations will be messed up. This is fine for an order entry program like TWS that doesn't have to show each and every trade since you are trading off bids and asks anyway. But this is not fine for a charting program that needs every trade to calculate volume, show the high/low of bars etc. Also, since there is no mechanism for getting "historical" data from the IB servers, you have to do your own data collection and patching in case your computer goes down etc. Basically the IB datafeed is designed to support their order entry programs.

If you don't particularly care about "exact" highs and lows on your bars you'll be fine with a charting program that uses IB's feed. Otherwise you want a more robust datafeed like eSignal that was designed to support charting applications.

At best IB's data based charts can be a backup, and not a very good one at that. If you are trading real money with your charts, you should have a much more robust backup solution.

-Atin
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