GENERALISSIMO FRANCISCO FRANCO IS STILL DEAD.. AND SO IS OPENTICK

Yes, I have been MIA lately. But I did want to do an update on my previous blog post on OpenTick. So here is the latest news. Hat tip to Inside Market Data.

If you don’t know who Generalissimo Francisco Franco was, don’t worry, I didn’t either. But he was the subject of Saturday Night Live skit with Chevy Chase that was apparently a running joke on the show. Watch on YouTube.

XASAX NEEDS CASH NOW … OR AT LEAST A SUGAR DADDY

Xasax is/was the parent company of OpenTick, and they have a ‘funding crisis’. Also know a being ‘broke’. Ok, ‘broke’ is too harsh a term. Let’s just say they ran out of money.

They have put their business on ‘hold’ until it can find a buyer ( Sept ’09 ). I am not sure what on ‘hold’ means, but if I was a customer, I would be looking for another provider.

STILL HOPE

The guy who started OpenTick and Xasax seems to be a serial entrepenuer. He has several domains ( all of which are dead ) , so you never know what he may come up with in the future. The Opentick founder apparently has a couple hundred domains registered, and I only checked a few.

http://quantumarbitrage.net

http://xliquidity.com

http://atsfund.net

http://FreeTickData.com

MAYBE IT IS FOR THE BEST

I cannot really shed a tear for those guys, they were sort of dicks. Back in the day, I talked to them about getting a feed from Xasax for my job.

They seemingly could not answer simply questions about their service, and always wanted to do a webinar. Then they would schedule and then miss the webinar, with an excuse letter a couple of days later. After it happened twice, I gave up on them. They seemed overpriced at the time. I don’t really know if they were because I never had a chance to talk to them.

MIT/LIT ORDERS MIA IN NINJATRADER

With any trading platform, there will always be ONE feature that you need that is not implemented. For me that is Limit If Touched orders with a negative offset in NinjaTrader. I was on a long trip recently and I finally had time to implement MIT/LIT for a strategy I was writing.

Long flights are great for getting work done. I will dread the day they allow cell phones in all planes.

On, on to the orders. Market if touched are a very similar to stop limit orders. They are both types of orders that occur only if the price reaches a certain level. With a Market If Touched order, once a price reaches a certain level, a market order is executed.

In Ninjatrader, there are some limitations to stop limit orders in strategies which are annoying, such as setting a negative stop price. I guess there is some reason for that, but it is beyond me. Maybe in NinjaTrader 7 they will have it for strategies.

If you have used StopLimit orders before and have seen an error about an improperly placed  order, then you know that I am talking about.

For these situations, we can use a Market If Touched or Limit If Touched order to accomplish the same thing , without the annoying errors and stopping of your strategy.

MIT / MARKET IF TOUCHED

A buy market-if-touched order is an order to buy at the best available price, if the market price goes down to the “if touched” level. As soon as this trigger price is touched the order becomes a market buy order.

A sell market-if-touched order is an order to sell at the best available price, if the market price goes up to the “if touched” level. As soon as this trigger price is touched the order becomes a market sell order.

LIT / LIMIT IF TOUCHED

Just like MIT order except that a limit order instead of a market order. This is the closest one to a stop limit order.

IMPLEMENTING IN CODE

You can only do this if you are writing code, I do not believe the strategy wizard can do this. I am not sure, I rarely use strategy wizard for anything.

This may be considered advanced programming, but it is not that hard. It just looks harder than it is. It is considered ‘advanced’ programming by the people on the Ninja Trader support forum, so they will not be that helpful.

Now for either of these orders , you have to monitor the prices, in-between bar updates. For that, we use OnMarketData. This recieves the price every time the price changes. This also increases the work your computer has to do , so be careful.

protected override void OnMarketData(MarketDataEventArgs e)

The variable e has a MarketDataType attached, and this is what you want to trigger you trade from. There are different things you can trigger from.

• MarketDataType.Ask
• MarketDataType.Bid
• MarketDataType.DailyHigh
• MarketDataType.DailyLow
• MarketDataType.DailyVolume
• MarketDataType.Last
• MarketDataType.LastClose

Mind you, not every data provider furnishes those. So when we see the price we want e.Price , if it is above our buy stop, we can then enter an order.

if (e.MarketDataType == MarketDataType.Ask)

{

 

Now, this is just a start, and there are a lot of things you can do with this. Such as shorting when the bid reaches a certain price and so on.

MIT definition from Wikipedia

WAITING FOR NT 7
If you knew me, you would know I am a big ACD fan. We had a bunch of ACD indicators written for Ninja Trader, but had not released them. ( We released two as stand alone then pulled them back ). When we were looking at releasing them, NinjaTrader 7 was going to be shipped ‘shortly’. We did release Pivot Moving Average, Sushi Roll and Opening Range indicators.

We wanted to wait for Ninja Trader 7 which was supposed to be released at the end of 2008, but has been pushed back. I am sure this is NOT a waiting for Godot type of delay, Ninja Trader 7 will be released, but this is the way software developemnt goes sometimes. Unless you are Microsoft, then it is the standard. So we are going to start releasing all of the ACD indicators we have for Ninja Trader over the next few weeks for Ninja Trader 6.5. Hopefully, there will not be a lot of changes between NinjaTrader 6.5 and NinjaTrader 7.0.

THE LOGICAL TRADER
For those of you who don’t know, ACD is the method outlined in the bok, ‘The Logical Trader’, by Marc Fisher. I don’t think anyone uses ‘pure’ ACD anymore, but there is a lot of good stuff to take away from the book.

GODOT
NinjaTrader 7 AS OF THIS POST is supposedly scheduled for a second quarter 09 beta. ‘Nuff said. For those of you who do not like plays, Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters wait for someone named Godot. Godot never shows up.

The photo has nothing to do with ACD, NinjaTrader, or Godot. I just like auto show girls. You can click on the image to make it bigger.

    Well I am finally doing it. I am going to rename all the indicators from TraderWerks…. to TW…..  Personally , I like using the full long name better. It is clearer, but it is also long and annoying. In case you haven’t noticed, the new indicators I have written , have used TW instead of the long name.

     Such is life. All the old indicators that you have downloaded will still work, so no worries. But if you do have any problems, email me or leave a message in the support forum.

Well, we have finally gotten the site to work with IE. Sucks, but we are not really IE people around here. Sure, our site works with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Conq, Camino, etc….. And now Internet Explorer.

We are switching designers to the designer who did this blog for the main site. The IE bugs were just a problem. So ‘real soon now’ we will be merging the designs. And hopefully getting rid of all these IE problems.

how much I hate Internet Explorer. The minute we fix one bug, we find another. So yes, we still have more work to do to fix the layout. Sorry about that. If you are using anything BUT IE, the site is fine.

Three things that never change, Death, Taxes and Microsoft suckage.

Well, I was bitten by Microsoft. This website works in all the web browsers I use EXCEPT Microsoft Internet Explorer. 

Seriously, what is Microsoft doing? This web site will work in Opera, Kong,  Safari, Firefox, and Camino.

But not Microsoft.  Such is life. We will have someone look at the site shortly. But if you are using Internet Explorer, you probably don’t see this post anyway.

 

EDIT That was quick. It is the “float drop” bug that has been in Internet Explorer for years. Well, I guess it is not a bug since it has been in there for years. If you want more info, check out the CSS. Welcome our Microsoft overlords.