v0.7.0 - Oanda API

As promised, v0.7.0 is now available for download. The major feat is, of course, that it now works with the Oanda API.

http://www.thinkingstuff.com/download.aspx

Well, when I say "works", I mean you can download prices. And account information. And transactions, which in turn gets the order and trade information, but this part of it has some bugs. I'd wait until the next version before doing anything with transactions, trades and orders.

But downloading prices it does, and does well. And, because Oanda offers about 35 different currencies and 10 intervals for download, plus tick data, I thought it would be better to update the way you, the user, specifies which of those prices to download. That's the other major feat.

Previously it was one-by-one, and it would have driven you mad. So now there's a feature that lets you do it in bulk. Click "File..." > "Data Manager". Then click the "Bulk..." button. You'll work it out.

Feat #3 is that you can now specify the delimiter to use for the backtesting output files. Apparently commas aren't good to use as a delimiter for some locales.

Feat #4 is you can specify the directory for the backtesting output files.

Feat #5 is a rudimentary world clock.

Also fixed a couple of errors you might have received when backtesting in the Trial Version mode.

There are 3 new intervals you can choose from - 5-Second, 10-Second, and 30-Second. Oanda offer those plus 1-Minute, 5-Minute, 15-Minute, 30-Minute, 1-Hour, 3-Hour, Daily. If you want to use any other interval with Oanda, like Weekly, 2-Hourly, etc, you can get Thinking Stuff to create that data for you.

I tried a different way to get the OCX file needed for the charts to register properly. Let me know if it works or not. If not, you can read this page to see how to get it working by yourself.

Oh, and I changed the font of everything to Arial. It was 'MS UI Gothic', and I thought perhaps this was the reason there were some formatting errors on every other computer but mine.

For a complete list of everything that changed, check out the Change Log.
http://www.thinkingstuff.com/change-log.aspx

And let's not forget:
http://www.thinkingstuff.com/purchase.aspx

One more thing about the Oanda API. There's no getting around the US$600 that you have to pay to them in order to use it. Further, part of their licence agreement is that you have to keep a record of all locations of the files they give you. So I can't distribute those files to everyone, lest I be breaking that licence agreement. All it means is that you will need to copy a few files that Oanda will give you, to the Thinking Stuff installation directory. If you don't copy these files, then Thinking Stuff will crash abruptly if you try to use the Oanda features. The files are: FXClient.dll, fxClientAPI.dll, msvcp71.dll, msvcr71.dll, pthreadVC.dll, zlib1.dll.

People not using the Oanda features will not be affected by that.