Manually entering the details for a new order is a bit of a hassle, especially when you just want to get that order placed NOW! NOW! NOW!

At the bare minimum, you have the entry price, the stop loss price, the number of units, and the currency.

Doing it through TS, you also need to enter the trading system and account to use.

It's a bit much. But, there is a way around it. You can use the Copy function provided by TS, which will open up the Orders Update window with all the same settings as the order being copied.

Click the Save And Close, or Send Order To Broker button, and you're done.

You'd probably want to change a couple of the settings before you send this new order off to the broker, but this shortcut gets you out of having to fill absolutely everything in absolutely every time you place an order manually through TS.

A trick with the dates is to be aware of the start time for that company's "Day".

With Gain Capital the start time is 10PM (GMT).

So what you might think of as the Daily bar for November 2nd, actually starts at 10PM on November 1st.

What it means is if anywhere in TS (backtesting, charts, view data, etc) you choose a "From" date of "01-Jan-06 00:00:00", the Daily bar starting at "31-Dec-2005 22:00:00" will not be included.

Similarly, choosing a "To" date of "31-Jan-2006 23:59:59" will include the Daily bar that starts at "31-Jan-2006 22:00:00".

Oanda's start of day is midnight GMT, so there is no such problem with their data.

Oanda's account structure is like this:
- Main Account
   - Sub-Account #1
   - Sub-Account #2

TS's account structure is like this:
- Account #1
- Account #2
- Account #3

So how do you set up Oanda sub-accounts in TS?

Firstly, set up your User in TS, using the Oanda username. Let's say the username is "Bob".

Now, each account or sub-account in Oanda has a different account number. You should create one TS account for each Oanda account or sub-account.

E.g. you have an Oanda account with username "Bob" and #123456789. That account has a sub-account #987654321.

In TS, create your Oanda user "Bob". Then create one TS account, with user "Bob" and account number #123456789. Then create another TS account, with user "Bob" and account number #987654321.

In summary, 1 Oanda account with 1 sub-account equals 2 accounts with the same User but different account numbers in TS.

When you set up your trading accounts in TS, there is an option to mark it as a "Real" or "Paper" account.

This has caused some confusion with "Real" and "Demo" accounts.

Here's the difference: Think of account types of "Real" and "Paper" in TS as "exists with a broker" and "exists in my head for practice purposes".

So if the account exists with a broker, even if it's a Demo account, it is in fact "Real".

"Paper" accounts will not be used for auto-trading, nor for downloading price, transaction, and account information from the broker.

On the Command Centre, there are 2 places for downloading prices from Oanda.

One is the "Price Downloads" tab and the other is the "Special Price Downloads" tab.

The latter downloads only the prices needed by active trading systems and active alerts. In this way, you can be sure that your active trading systems and alerts are getting fresh data to work off when they need to do their calculations.

You then use the Price Downloads section to download as much data as you want, so you can use it for backtesting later on.

Doing both is fine, and recommended, but it may sometimes lead to an error being displayed:

Problem encountered while downloading special prices from Oanda:

ERROR: 23505: duplicate key violates unique constraint "pk_zoanda_usdjpy_30s"

at
ThinkingStuff.frmAutoTrading. bgwPriceOandaSpecial_RunWorkerCompleted (Object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e)

This particular error was for USDJPY 30-Second bars.

The error comes about when both the Price Downloads and Special Price Downloads are downloading the same currency/interval at the same time. When they both start, neither thinks a particular bar has been entered into the database yet. One will do the insert before the other. The other will try to do the same insert, but now that bar is actually there.

The database doesn't allow a particular bar to be inserted more than once, so this error is shown.

Because the bar is already there, this is not a problem. Don't worry about it.

The regularity of this error will depend on how many currencies/intervals you are downloading. The more currencies/intervals you are downloading, the less likely both the Price Downloads and Special Price Downloads are going to be working on the same ones at the same time.

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.

Download - See what changed - Purchase.