What is really unique about MultiCharts, and TSSupport?

This forum is filled with many 'contributions' to support the development of the MC product. However, these postings do sometimes take the form of 'complaints' or 'request for help or changes'. It is a very great credit to the TSSupport company and its staff that they have chosen to make this forum 'uncensored', because this is rather unique in the whole industry of commercial software products. It is more typical of a forum 'moderator' to delay the postings until that posting has been 'sanitized'.

I would like to see a forum topic added that also provides some 'balance' to what otherwise might be perceived (maybe by new 'guests') as rather critical or negative tone to some of the inputs. I for example am one of those who have at times expressed some 'frustration' with some 'issues' that are not seemingly 'resolved' over a protracted time-period , but I am also very aware of *why* this MC product is very unique and worth a lot more than some writers have expressed .

I suspect that there are many 'users' who really appreciate the unique features of this MC product, but there are probably *very* few who have any clue what those 'unique' features have 'cost' in the way of extraordinary design efforts to achieve, or what kind of 'trade-offs' were made to achieve certain unique 'features', right? TSSupport should be given more 'credit' for these 'achievements', in my opinion.

It should be noted that TSSupport has, in my opinion, already achieved in 2-3 years (with minimal financial resources) what TS, etc., has not even seemingly attempted to achieve. But of coarse, 'beauty' is always "in the eyes of the beholder', so everyone will have a different value-scale of what is most important to them, at any given point in time.

I am thinking of certain features that have been desired by most users of the TS lineage of products (that span over a decade of time), but neither OmegaResearch nor TS developers ever offered,e.g., multi-time-frames (AND N-tick bars) on the SAME chart.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that this one feature has cost TSSupport developers the 'biggest challenge' to achieve (otherwise TS would have delivered it too, a long time ago). I really appreciate this 'feature', but it probably didn't happen without giving up some speed performance, right?

I would really like to hear from the TSSupport developers how much of their energy is devoted to 'making this feature work' across so many different data-vendors. As an (ex-) programmer, I have some 'appreciation' for the complexity and trade-off headaches that were implied by adding this 'feature'. I kind of wonder whether there is any 'regrets', or are we (you) about at the 'finish line' for this challenge, and (almost) ready for the next one?

The other unique feature is the large number of supported data-vendors, as well as the 'free' data sources (mostly for stock quotes), and of course its support of the Interactive Brokers (IB) brokerage that is very popular for (mostly stock) traders, as well as the eSignal, ASCII files, etc...,,,how many data-vendors I have not counted..

I personally, have no interest in the IB support, because I have no intention of using them as my brokerage. My interest is mostly Forex trading, and eSignal data gives me the flexibility to monitor/analyze almost any market, and trade (manually) with almost any brokerage, so that is my data vendor of choice (for now). The EasyLanguage support is also essential to me, so that I can leverage the many years of previous use of the TS software.

Perhaps, other users would like to add to the list of their 'favorite' features? How many users have any programming experience and can appreciate the incredible amount of work that has been devoted to make the MC product as useful as it is today, in spite of some of its remaining 'bugs'?

Volume histograms....genetic algo optimization...true constant volume bars...great customer support...the list goes on....

The support by TSSupport is BEYOND-THE-CALL-OF-DUTY excellent.

This quality alone is worth much more than it cost.

Khalid

I agree totally denizen.

TSSUPPORT is very responsive to customers needs in developing a platform that can use any major data source and allow the user to program his needs in easylanguage.

There now seems to be enough users to provide a critical mass to both test what is being developed as well as assisting each other as issues arise.

As others have mentioned support is excellent. Having established that though, the support from a couple from serious competitors is top notch also. Perhaps traders won't settle for less! Its good for us at least.

I guess compiling easy language with little to know modification is a great plus. I've always liked easy language for diddling around and trying new ideas. It is when all said and done.....easy.

Supporting a wide variety of data vendors API's is a big plus though potentialy time consuming. I think the IB API is particularly important. Working on the assumption that many many of the struggling, under capitalised traders are going to be be using this feed it makes the market for TSSupport potentially much much larger. I actually think IB feed is great for live trading last time I checked against other feeds it was consistently ahead when volatility picks up. I have seen e$ignal 30 seconds behind in fast markets. I guess that's the upside if tick aggregation.

Despite this I find MC frustrating in day to day use, it has great potential however in many places this is not fully realised. Anyway that's not a subject for this thread though I do hope and pray that TS concentrate on spit and polish so that it has a chance of winning customers away from more established platforms.

Cheers.
Nick.

I have been with MC for over a year now. Their support has always been number 1 in my books.

MC software has come a long way from a year ago.

I am located in Canada and I can still purchase TS 2000i here for almost 3,000 USD WITH NO support.

Very happy with the direction MC is going and I look forward to future releases and improvements.

Thank you, Denizen2, Eminimaniac, Khalaad, Momentum, Nick and Neurotrader for your kind encouraging words.

Our developers are working hard and we believe that our product will satisfy all your needs in the future.

Nick,

What features and improvements should we add to make you satisfied?

Hi Kate,

could you give an longer term outlook what features the developers plan to add in the next 12-16 month?

As i see in the "Feature requests topic" and in various post there are some major wishes like
- scanner/radarsreen
- trading from chart with complite order routing
- portfolio level backtesting
- Continous Contracts/Rollover for IB-Data

and some minor
- insidebid/ask/ Trade at bid to support MD codes
- copy/past charts
- allow to use paintbar with candlestick
- drawarea function

Regards

Nick,

What features and improvements should we add to make you satisfied?

Phone tech support should be available AFTER day trading hours. I noticed right now it is from 6:30 AM till 2:00 PM EST. That's about when most trading takes place. Phone support should be available from, say 1030 to 6:30 or 7pm EST. Or from 12:00-8pm. The afternoon support would be better than the morning IMO.

But mainly, I wish TSsupport would FOCUS on just a few things at a time and polish them well. I get this impression that you develop in about 100 different directions simultaneously. Have a public "to-do" list on your website. This should include currently working on items. Check them off one-by-one as you release a new beta. Each beta should also have incremental release notes. These notes should be updated weekly. Patches should be on the main part of the site as well as the forum. If you are going to keep all this stuff on the forum, then there should be a seperate folder or thread for admin only that posts all new releases, betas, notes, etc. Only admin can post to this thread.

But to stick to the thread topic, I also agree that I like the direction that MC is headed. What I didn't know was that MC seems to be the only software other than Ensign to draw the volume bars correctly. (true, user-defined volume bars)

The potential for MC is great. That's why I picked up a permanent license