Future-COMBOS

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PK1
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Future-COMBOS

Postby PK1 » 28 Aug 2018

Hello,

since Version 11 Multicharts offers Combos/Composites and the info tells me that this only focuses on charting and not trading. That's fine for me. Since a while I started trading spreads of the CL-Future but with my own indicator. With Version 12 I started to check MC-Functionality I didn't use so far, including the charting of Combos. There are mainly two things, I'll try to explain and emphasizing my final questions with bold text:

1. The tab-pages for selecting of an instrument has been extended on several places of MC but not in the Format Instrument-Dialog. There a combo can only be found unterneath "All Instruments". As with the other places such a tab-page for combos would be what one is expecting, it's just forgotten here. For cryptocurrencies it's there.

2. I wonder where the (partly wrong) data for a combo is coming from. Let me explain this: On some combinations of futures the exchange offers native combos. IB as my broker and data provider has this and MC is supporting IB when it comes to combos. So that part should be fine.

2.1. My example is a native combo traded in IB and charted in IB and MC --> CLZ8/CLX8. As I could see MC is using exactly the last price of the native combo, which is as I'd expect it. Another possibility is deriving the combo from the two underlying instruments which would lead to distinctions because of a different order book when it comes to native combos. Does MC really check whether there are native combos because many spreads are not native and just put together.

2.2. Attached is a screenshot of the mentioned spread CLZ8/CLX8. As I said above my investigation so far showed that the combo-data in MC shows correctly the last prices. But this only applies to specific times, it's not always the case. Tracking the prices with MC the data seems to be correct and if a price shown in the chart touches one of my orders it get's filled. Looking on the chart in MC older bars definitely don't show real prices of the combo drawn. The spreads are widened extremely on the chart which are definetely no combo-prices and most likely no prices of the underlying futures either. It's completely true that in case of combos such widened spreads can happen ... but with these native combos on CL which I check daily many hours since installation of version 12, with these combos the shown combo-data is not correct, except the data is catched in real time with MC open. As I said not even using the both underlying futures could lead to such spikes. Also: Checking the prices in IB the data shows me prices without all these extreme spikes on MC.

So according to 2.2. the data tracked in real time seem to be perfect by using the data of the native combo but history data don't and also they don't match to the data IB itself shows in a chart.
Attachments
Chart 00126.jpg
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Svetlana MultiCharts
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Re: Future-COMBOS

Postby Svetlana MultiCharts » 20 Sep 2018

Hello, PK1,

Let me address your questions in order:
1. Additional tab for combos was not added as it can be excessive for other users, who don’t use this category. We have forwarded this request to the developers for further analysis and estimation of improvement possibility in one of the future MultiCharts versions.

2.1. In MultiCharts it is possible to make a specific request to IB API in order to receive data for combos. MultiCharts doesn’t check if there are any other instruments.
Please make a short video or a series of screenshots demonstrating how to display “native combos” in IB TWS.

2.2. MultiCharts receives historical and real-time data for combos through IB API.
Please refer to the screenshots:
1.jpg
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2.jpg
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The screenshots demonstrate that MultiCharts displays data the same way as in IB API Sample. Please use the screenshot of IB API Sample to report the issue to IB support directly.


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