After Payment
Once you have completed the payment, we will be informed of the payment, and we'll know the email address of the person that made the payment, but the information that we need to set you up is your hard-drive details. Please read the "How Does Verification Work?" article to read why.
So, after payment, please send us an email using the same email address you used to make the payment, and provide us with your hard-drive model and serial number.
There are two places within TS that make it easy to get those hard-drive details. The first is the Login window. This is the window that appears when you first start Thinking Stuff.
The second is the About window, which appears when you click "Admin..." > "Hard-drive make and model", and also when you click "Help..." > "About Thinking Stuff".
Copy and paste both the hard-drive model and serial number into an email, send it to us, and we'll have you set up as soon as we can.
Here's looking forward to a long and prosperous partnership!
Auto-Trading with Gain Capital
Auto-Trading works in Gain Capital Demo accounts, but not Gain Capital Live accounts. Please read the Gain Capital Quirks page to see the reasoning behind this.
Gain Capital does not charge for use of their API.
Auto-Trading with Oanda
Auto-Trading works in both Oanda Demo and Live accounts.
Oanda is regarded by many has having the best and most stable API, but they do charge a fee to use it. You have to purchase it from them (i.e. it has nothing to do with us). You can read more about it at their API page.
Ask the Oanda people for the Visual Studio 2003 version of their API.
If you don't subscribe...
To download and install the Thinking Stuff software is completely free. There is a Trial Version mode the software will run in, which is free to use for as long as you like. However, certain features will be crippled until you subscribe.
There is some other software required before this software will run on your computer, namely PostgreSQL and the Windows .NET Framework v2.0. Both of these are free also. Please go to the "Installation Requirements" section of the Download page for further information.
With Thinking Stuff, downloading real-time currency data is free.
To be precise, a combination of a Gain Capital demo account and Thinking Stuff will allow you to download real-time tick data for free. Setting up your Gain Capital demo account is free (well, maybe some faxes to send off), and the Data Download part of Thinking Stuff is not crippled in any way.
What's Crippled In The Trial-Version Mode?
The basic theory is that you'll be able to set everything up, you'll be able to click all the buttons, but the actual doing of the task will not be done.
This will let you get everything set up, with or without our support, before you need to pay any money.
Specifically, here's what happens when you are not subscribed:
- Backtesting - when you try to backtest, the software will ignore the dates you want to backtest over, and will instead test over a set period from a time well in the past. It's real prices being used, but due to how old the data is, the usefulness of the results are debatable.
Further, the currency you want to backtest will also be ignored. Instead, only EURUSD prices will be used. Please note that because EURUSD has 4 decimal places, if you were trying to backtest something like USDJPY which has just 2 decimal places, you might get some strange results.
To summarise, regardless of the dates or currency you wanted to backtest, the actual prices used are EURUSD from a time well in the past.
- Automatic Trading - all buttons and windows work exactly as if you were subscribed. The only difference is that the Automatic Trading is not done (which I guess is a pretty big difference).
- Alerts - everything but the actual Alerts being sent will work just fine.
The "Trial Version" mode is simply how the software behaves if you are not subscribed to anything.
You may subscribe to any combination of modules.
None rely on the other. For example, you can subscribe to both Backtesting and Alerts, or just Alerts, or just Backtesting.