NOTE: With the creation of the Thinking Stuff User Manual (available on the Download page), this Knowledge Base has become more of just an announcements area. So maybe not so interesting. Try the Blog instead.
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Articles from
September 2006
Download - See what changed - Purchase.
The main change in v0.8.1 is the ability to create holidays in which your trading systems won't trade, and your alerts won't fire.
- Holidays:
- Auto-trading and Alerts can both have holidays attached.
- Holidays can be defined as between particular dates (e.g. 1:03AM 21-Sep-06 to 2:55:06PM 22-Sep-06); for days of the week (e.g. 1:03AM Thursdays to 2:55:06PM Fridays); or for days of the month (e.g. 1:03AM every 2nd Thursday to 2:55:06PM every 3rd Friday).
- Insert a standard 'weekend' holiday.
- Functionality to download the Forex Factory Calendar, and automatically create holidays from those calendar events. User decides which level of Forex Factory events (high impact/medium impact/low impact) creates Holidays.
- Downloading prices from Oanda for any length of time causes a fatal error. Clicking on the OK button of that error message and TS crashes. Not clicking on the OK button and TS continues just fine. This error was on Oanda's side. Updating to the fxClient-VB-VS2003-2006-09-07.zip release of the VB.Net API fixed the problem.
- Don't store weekend data from Oanda, unless there has been some price movement.
- Need to use the locale settings on the machine being used. There are a number of things which currently will not work properly unless the date and currency settings are set to "Western" settings (Swedish dates have caused problems).
- Charts - Price where %b would equal X does not take into account the X part, so it always charts where %b would equal zero (which is the same as the Lower Bollinger Line). The error was chart-specific, no problems with backtesting or auto-trading.
- Charts - Fixed Lower and Upper Bollinger Line indicators on chart. Again, there were no problems with backtesting or auto-trading.
- Added Help section to Change Systems Settings window. Also for Change Alerts Settings, Login windows.
- Timeout value on Version Check window is now used.
- Oanda's start of day is always 4AM GMT.
- Oanda - Handle "Order Canceled (BV:SL)" event.
- Mark All messages read - use better Update statement. Was v.slow when updating thousands of messages.
- Format all the result grids properly (column widths, etc).
Download - See what changed - Purchase.
The main changes in v0.8.0 are the inclusion of price, indicator, and trading alerts. Charting has also improved greatly.
- Alerts:
- Price & Indicator-based Alerts.
- Trading Alerts (place order, modify order, cancel order, trade entered, stop loss/take profit modified, trade exited).
- Can have many rules that must be met for an alert to be sent.
- Have setting for how many times to send an alert before switching it off. Or can choose to never switch it off.
- Alerts are sent to a specified email address. Or to the screen. Or both.
- Charts:
- Have horizontal scrollbar instead of "One Bar Left" and "One Bar Right" buttons.
- Right-click allows colour change.
- Right-click allows delete of trend lines and line studies.
- Horizontal line is now added to the panel with the selected series/indicator.
- Y-axis range now affects the panel with the selected series/indicator.
- Sort Add Indicator pull-down list.
- Allow user to chart custom indicators, such as Average Pullback Histogram, Bar Swings, etc (anything that the user can select as a Rule or Value, but is not provided by the 3rd-party charts module).
- Replace the 3rd-party "add indicator" window with my own.
- When adding indicators, name them "SMA (20)", "Stochastic (5,3,3)", etc, not SMA, SMA 2, SMA 3.
- Make it possible to remove a horizontal line that the user added previously.
- When deleting one line that makes up a multi-line indicator (e.g. Bollinger Bands, Directional Movement System), remove all lines that comprise that indicator.
- Can't select an indicator if the value of the indicator doesn't change at all. Therefore can't remove such an indicator without refreshing the chart.
- Make it easy to reapply the last applied chart template.
- Throws error in real-time mode when a new tick comes along and indicator parameter window is open.
- Sometimes clicking the Update button doesn't seem to update anything. But, actually, the new bars are there, just you have to click the Move One Bar Right button to view them. It would be much better if you didn't have to use the Move One Bar Right button.
- The Add Indicator window seems to be truncated. This is functionality from the vendor of the charts module, and they say that this occurs if you aren't using a certain font size on your screen resolution.
- For Gain Capital, disallow a take profit to be added, if the order was originally created without one. Oanda lets you add take profits later. ** N.b. Didn't fix this, but decided that because Gain Capital will show the error, it's not worth spending much time on. **
- User can set the Auto-Trading status on Systems Update window (not just on Command Centre).
- Need some way to set it up so Systems and Alerts can be kicked off individually at specific times (i.e. not just all active ones are kicked off every minute).
- Create system. Use 5-Second as interval for trailing stop. Error when backtesting - "There is no row at position -1".
- Disallow the user to select some Config Types, depending on what they are:
- [OHLC] Of Last X Bars Clear Of Entry cannot be an Entry Rule.
- Typical Price Of Last X Bars Clear Of Entry cannot be an Entry Rule.
- X Pips Above Calculated Entry cannot be an Entry Value.
- X Pips Below Calculated Entry cannot be an Entry Value.
- Exit At Market cannot be an Entry Value, nor an Initial S/L Value, nor an Initial T/P Value.
- New paragraph in licence regarding the timeliness of alerts through email.
- Links from Help menu to Systems Trading Theory, Problems With Backtesting, The Good & Bad of Automated Trading.
- A couple of result grids don't resize the row height properly when first populated.
- Updated Npgsql drivers (the thing that allows VB.Net to connect to PostgreSQL). Current driver version RC3, previous version was Beta2.
- Updated Oanda API. If you are a user of the Oanda API, please ensure you too have the latest version installed.
- Gain Capital now offers NZD/JPY.
- Errors on the Command Centre should not be messageboxes - insert Messages instead. This allows the countdowns to continue without user intervention.
- Minor GUI changes.
The code to utilise the Oanda API is done.
In order to use this software with Oanda, you still need to purchase the API from them. That's US$600 for the first 2 months, and then US$600 every month after that. They do give discounts of $50 for every $1 million worth of trades completed within that month, so if you trade a total of $12 million or more the API use becomes free. And, even if you didn't use it at all, the monthly fee should never be more than $400 ( click here to see how).
But because it does cost, we recommend starting with Gain Capital's demo account for free, until you have a trading system that works. Up to you.
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