Many improvements remain to be done

Questions about MultiCharts .NET and user contributed studies.
Fabrice
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Many improvements remain to be done

Postby Fabrice » 03 Jun 2014

Hello,

Here are some hints for improvements:
- decent .Net API - just an example : adding a data series from the code is so weird, and so many things that I have easily done with your other .Net trading platform competitor are done in crazy ways or just unfeasible
- decent drawing tools (just look at what NT and SC can do, no comment…)
- trading from the DOM is better than before, but far far far away from what can be done with your competitor (you will understand I am sure)
- more ability to customize the chart from the code - again have a look at the powerful API with the Object Browser in Visual Studio of your competitor - you can find almost everything imaginable - and useful - and not limited to the main panel (we cannot draw in indicators window, which would have been acceptable in 1995 but not in 2014).
- the equivalent of the manual trading report is fully customizable , does not corrupt when some trades are closed from TWS. And that is very very good.

As I use IB as data feed, I must say that MC does a great job to backfill and to display tick charts, which I find much more precise, and useful to place some trades that I would not be able to spot with your competitor. But spotting a trade and place the trade with another platform is not the way I I like to work.

What I ask here is not extraordinary, it is just basic things that need to be properly implemented. Not being able to draw a single line straight without fighting with the mouse is just an example. Not being able to draw a dot line with a width of 3 pixels is crazy.

With .Net, MC is hopefully now in the 21st century. So please now update all the remaining. For MC.Net 10 ?...

Best regards.

Fabrice

Fabrice
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Re: Many improvements remain to be done

Postby Fabrice » 04 Jun 2014

I have already noticed that in the past, but I have now no more doubt about it : you modify our messages. You have changed many things in my message. For example the fact that I have been asking these enhancements for years, and also the fact that these enhancements concern really obvious things that should have been properly implemented from the start, because most of them are so basic requirement for many discretionary traders.

I hardly believe this way of preventing other users from learning from our experience may help to enhance the quality and credibility of MC team. Putting the dust under the carpet has never been a good way to make "clean" things, and one day or another, everyone will see the mountain of dust.

I think users of this forum should know that you change our messages, without notice of any kind.

Best regards,

Fabrice

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JoshM
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Re: Many improvements remain to be done

Postby JoshM » 04 Jun 2014

I hardly believe this way of preventing other users from learning from our experience may help to enhance the quality and credibility of MC team. Putting the dust under the carpet has never been a good way to make "clean" things, and one day or another, everyone will see the mountain of dust.
Ironically, the main reason I clicked on 'Thanks' for your message was that I find it gracious of you to take the time to brainstorm on improvements even when you don't use MC .NET any more. I think that type of information, from an 'outside view', can be quite valuable.
I think users of this forum should know that you change our messages, without notice of any kind.
The discretionary removal of forum messages sometimes makes me concerned. I put time and effort in helping other users (yesterday I spend more than one hour on code examples/testing for just two topics in the general MultiCharts area). But what if my posts are edited (without people knowing) or worse, removed? (Sure, MultiCharts can do without my forum presence, but if other people also are concerned by this, this might be a problem).

Then there is the issue of what is allowed and what not allowed. I did not consider Fabrice's original message overly offensive. So why was this message edited?

Honestly, I don't think there's a reason why critical messages should be edited (if that was the motivation). Even with MultiCharts' limitation, it still has enough benefits over competing software.
Last edited by JoshM on 04 Jun 2014, edited 2 times in total.

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Henry MultiСharts
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Re: Many improvements remain to be done

Postby Henry MultiСharts » 04 Jun 2014

Hello Fabrice and JoshM,

The original post of Fabrice has been edited as it contained subjective accusations. Such messages are not acceptable and are off topic. No meaningful content of your post was removed.
Our discussion forum is for constructive dialogue. If you want to get help - there is no point being offensive to our support team or company management. If you have functionality suggestions – please create a feature request in the Project Management section of our website or send it directly to support@multicharts.com Please keep in mind that not all requests can be implemented due to the fact that some features do not fit into our current roadmap.

Like any other company we have management that decides what and when to add, how to manage the company and roadmaps of its products. We value your personal opinion but we cannot accept if it is expressed in an offensive manner. If you have any messages that you want to be directly forwarded to the management of our company - send them directly to support@multicharts.com

JoshM, we value your contribution into our product and community. You can be sure no valuable information or constructive criticism is ever edited or removed from the forum posts.

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JoshM
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Re: Many improvements remain to be done

Postby JoshM » 04 Jun 2014

You can be sure no valuable information or constructive criticism is ever edited or removed from the forum posts.
Okay, thanks for addressing that point and the reassurance. I probably took it more serious that I should have, so I've edited the over-reaction from my message as a means of an apology.

To prevent confusion about why (and if) a message was edited in the future, would it be possible to include a reason for editing at the end of the post? (like Moderator edit: offensive attitude) Then other users don't have to guess the motivation behind the edit.

Added benefit: the poster and other readers in the thread then also know which forum rule was broken. In the case of this topic, the negative attitude only got worse while now (when I know the edit reason), I just think "ah okay, fair enough and can see why that was done".

Shall we now discuss how to improve MultiCharts? :)

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Henry MultiСharts
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Re: Many improvements remain to be done

Postby Henry MultiСharts » 04 Jun 2014

JoshM, thank you for your suggestion. We will use it in the future, if there is a need for that :-)

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Re: Many improvements remain to be done

Postby MidKnight » 08 Jun 2014

I have already noticed that in the past, but I have now no more doubt about it : you modify our messages. You have changed many things in my message. For example the fact that I have been asking these enhancements for years, and also the fact that these enhancements concern really obvious things that should have been properly implemented from the start, because most of them are so basic requirement for many discretionary traders.

I hardly believe this way of preventing other users from learning from our experience may help to enhance the quality and credibility of MC team. Putting the dust under the carpet has never been a good way to make "clean" things, and one day or another, everyone will see the mountain of dust.

I think users of this forum should know that you change our messages, without notice of any kind.

Best regards,

Fabrice
Yes, I've had them do this to me before. TS used to do it a lot when I was a customer some 10 years ago. I was very very vocal about it, it actually got me banned from the forum. I couldn't believe it. Banning a customer that is giving feedback. Since that experience I have been hugely vocal against TS as a product and as a company. I sincerely hope that MC does not follow their footsteps.

The feedback given from the customers is a direct reflection of meeting the customers needs. Sweeping things under the rug by moderating customer feedback lacks integrity and paints a deceitful vision of the product.

No doubt, this topic will be locked soon.

With all my best,
MK

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Re: Many improvements remain to be done

Postby MidKnight » 08 Jun 2014

Our discussion forum is for constructive dialogue. If you want to get help - there is no point being offensive to our support team or company management. If you have functionality suggestions – please create a feature request in the Project Management section of our website or send it directly to support@multicharts.com Please keep in mind that not all requests can be implemented due to the fact that some features do not fit into our current roadmap.
While I can appreciate than not all requests are to be implemented - I would expect that all requests are reviewed. This is not the case and as a direct result based on MC Teams choice, the project management section is useless to me - why should I go through the effort to start a dialogue about a feature when it may not even be looked at. If you are going to encourage a facility for making feature requests, at least review the requests and assign a timely and appropriate status based upon your review.

This is my biggest gripe about how the MC Team has chosen to manage customer requests. The staff forum responses are really good, but the project management section lacks reliable and timely responses.

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Re: Many improvements remain to be done

Postby Dru » 09 Jun 2014

- decent .Net API - just an example : adding a data series from the code is so weird, and so many things that I have easily done with your other .Net trading platform competitor are done in crazy ways or just unfeasible
MULTICHARTS .NET 9.0 BETA 1 – WHAT’S NEW:
...
New class added: CustomInstrument. It allows accessing the data series loaded by the DataLoader with the help of IInstrument interface. The bars of such data series are tied to the bars of the main data series based on time.
...

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Re: Many improvements remain to be done

Postby Fabrice » 12 Jun 2014

@Dru: thanks for pointing that but so many other things are missing.

@Henry/Mc Team

1/ I do not mean in any way to offense the MC Team. And I would be very curious to know why you tell my post was offending... There was no "subjective accusation" but only facts. Trying to bury a mole is not a very good idea in the long term...

2/ You hardly can justify your behaviour towards me when one know that I own 2 licenses of MC. 1 of MC and 1 of MC.Net. I have purchased MC several years ago. And MC.Net just when it was released, because I was still in hope that you would do your best (= to do as well as your competitors) to make it a good platform for discretionary trading. This is clearly not the case. The last major improvement in 9.0 beta (portfolio trading) clearly shows that automatic trading is still the focus of the company. And being able to draw a straight line is far from being an exploit, it is just what we expect to be able to do nowadays on a chart.

3/ As JoshM and MidKnight have noticed, I have taken the time to give you my feedback, and countless ours to describe bugs or badly implemented features. You should be grateful for that, but you are not. It is a feedback from a real discretionary trader that use very simple things for trading (MA, channels, trend lines, volume and sometimes the POC & VA). I believe many others do like me and this is why you hardly can ignore or just conceal our feedback when comparing MC with NT or SC. You have probably good reasons to do that, but they hardly make me think that you want to improve MC/MC.Net for discretionary traders. To be frank, I was hoping you were curious about the reasons of my feedback, and I would have taken the time to explain each point. Again a disappointement...

Discretionary trading is very hard, and I need tools that can do the job. That's all I am asking for. Just like you when you are buying a tv or a car, you choose the best that fits your need. I do the same with my trading tools. Not very hard to understand...

Best regards.

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Re: Many improvements remain to be done

Postby MidKnight » 12 Jun 2014

I agree with much of that. For discretionary trading, the MC platforms are unsatisfactory as they lack basic and IMO standard functionality and/or usability. For learning purposes, the platform lacks adequate playback functionality. For research related statistical coding purposes, I find the API cumbersome and tedious.

The push towards automated trading functionality is marketing driven due to the hype of auto trading - everyone thinks it'll be sipping pina colada by the pool while your trading bot is cashing in......How the MC team prioritize their feature set is certainly not driven by their current customer base and possibly driven by marketing belief of what the future customer base wants. Lots of companies do this - it is an acquisition of new business rather than one of retention. I was disappointed to realize this ;(

I too am a discretionary trader and bought MC.net with the idea that I could augment my trading through a platform facilitating research. Unfortunately it has become easier for me to do my research in a standard programming language external to the MC.net platform limitations or tediousness. So in the end, I use MC.net just for very basic charting. I hold onto hope that things will change but have yet to see a change in my 2 years as a customer.

With kind regards,
MK

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JoshM
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Re: Many improvements remain to be done

Postby JoshM » 13 Jun 2014

The last major improvement in 9.0 beta (portfolio trading) clearly shows that automatic trading is still the focus of the company.
The push towards automated trading functionality is marketing driven due to the hype of auto trading - everyone thinks it'll be sipping pina colada by the pool while your trading bot is cashing in.
While I do respect both of your points, I don't think this is a fair observation. Previous versions were heavily geared towards discretionary traders (e.g., new features such as time & sales, chart trading, volume profile, DOM). Given those versions, I think new features for automated traders were long overdue. :]


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