Ib/Paper Trade Problem

[bhanks]

I was testing how you can attach order tickets to charts and direct orders to either IB or the papertrader. I can get it to send the orders fine.

There seems to be 1 option you have included in your order ticket design that I would love to use but it seems to be broken.

Start by clicking trade at the top of your layout then click attach order ticket. Now you will have the order ticket on your chart.

The right click on the order ticket and edit template.

Now highlight either the buy or sell button and hit edit button.

In the middle section there is a quantity section.

The last one has:
$________worth rounded up down to nearest ____shares.

It looks like the radial buttons to choose up or down do not work.

If you enter say $15000 and then try to click the radial button to round down to the nearest 100 shares, it just calculates how many you can buy without rounding down. You can hit the ok button at bottom to accept changes. If you go back into edit button again, you will see that the button you checked to round down will be unchecked. Basically, whenever you select either radial button to round up or down it doesn't take the change and won't round.

Hopefully, someone can address this issue as I would love to only trade so much of my account per trade and not have to figure out if I can buy 800 shares because it is $15 dollar stock or only 200 shares because it is a $100 dollar stock.

thanks,

Brandon

[eSignal_JasonK]

Hello Brandon,

I just went through the scenario and I've confirmed the problem. The rounding feature is not working. I'll report this to our development team. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

[bhanks]

One Request/Suggestion regarding share quantity

Jason,

Thank you for confirming the problem. I wanted to make sure I didn't just have a defective download or something.

Since this is an issue and will need to be corrected, could you forward on one more suggestion/request?

This is directly related to the problem I pointed out to you in my last post. I must be the only one trying to use that function.

If you choose the fixed quantity like 500 shares, then on your button it will appear as buy 500.

When you select the option I was trying to use where you round the shares to the nearest 100 based on a predetermined dollar amount, it always just puts the dollar amount on the buy button.

Example: if you enter $10000 as the dollar amount to calculate the shares, the buy button will show buy 10000.

It would be much more helpful if the number of shares you can buy rounded down to the nearest 100 would appear.
I already know the dollar amount as I determine that. What I don't know is how many shares I can buy or sell.

The reason this becomes important is that sometimes if your close to a threshold price level the number of shares could increase or decrease by 100.

An example: you enter $10000 as the dollar amount and you want it to round down to the nearest 100.

The stock is trading at $10 so you can buy 1000 shares. Now say the stock has gone up to $11 dollars and your looking to exit. Now you can only sell based on that same calculation 900 shares but you own 1000. I don't mind working around this as I would probably use the manual sell order entry that is above those buttons. The problem is the way the button functionality is currently programmed to work you never know when that has become an issue until you actually hit the sell button and send an order and notice that it just sent an order to sell that is 100 shares less than what you really needed to sell.

The converse would be true for a short. You sell 1000 shares at $10 dollars. The stock drops to $9 and you enter a buy order to cover. Now the button would send a buy order to buy 1100 shares when you only own 1000.

I love the idea of the program being able to calculate the number of shares I can buy on the fly to get me into a position quickly. As long as it would constantly display the number of shares I could buy or sell on the buy/sell button, I don't mind accounting for descrepancies when the share count changes from when I originally made a trade. I just need to be able to see when this occurs so I know not to exit using that button.

Brandon

[eSignal_JasonK]

Hello Brandon,

The information I sent to development includes a URL for this thread. When they review the report, they will see your latest message. Thank you for the excellent description and detail.