Quotetrader and Oanda

[Purri]

Hello,

i just tried out Quotetrader and Oanda. Heres the list of problems i found:

* charts dont work. I suspect this is because Oanda only provides a bid and an ask price.

* Account manager - account filter: not all sub-accounts available in all tabs. Seems to be random which ones show up.

Average Position price disregards the price-scale and min movement symbol settings. (I.E. an EUR/USD position has an avg price of 1.41). I guess this is the reason Open P/L display doesnt work across the board.

* Trade manager:

I can only use market-orders, they are executed very slowly tho, like 10 seconds, using the Oanda client execution is almost instant. This defeats the purpose of a DOM-style order-entry.

Limit-orders fail with a "Invalid duration exception" message. I have to manually adjust the 'good till date' to atleast +1. Order-entry or modification is very slow (again, like 5 to 10 seconds).

Stop orders crash the application immediatly. This implies i cant use bracket-orders at all.

The Flatten-button tries to close all positions across al sub-accounts, regardless of which account i select in the trade-manager.

Quotes are too slow compared to the Oanda client.


In summary, im either doing something very wrong, or in the current state Quotetrader is not suitable for trading with Oanda. I cannot use charts nor the order-entry functions in any sensible way. Please fix.

Regards,
P.

[eSignal_AlexM]

Hi Purri.

Thanks for your post, and taking the time to let us know your thoughts.

To answer your questions:

1. You're correct, charts from Oanda are not currently implemented because at this time, Oanda's API only provides bid & ask quotes for its currency pairs.

2. The account filter collects values from all rows in a list. So if there are no rows in list you will see no available choice in the account filter.

3. Average price will disregard its price-scale because it's not an exact price but an average value.

4. We'll research your report of slow order execution.

5. Please set GTD to 1 in order defaults.

6. This behavior of flatten button is by design. Do you think it's inconvenient?

7. We will look into this. How do you check that quotes are slower in QT?

[eSignal_AlexM]

Quotes are too slow compared to the Oanda client.

Purri, what Oanda client did you use? Do you mean web based client?

[Purri]

Hello,

i use the normal Java client provided by Oanda. The slow quotes might be just a visual thing, i dont now. I checked by comparing the Oanda quoteboard with Quotetrader.

1. No charts: this is not a problem, i could use Oandas charts.

2. What list do you refer to? If i have all my 5 sub-accounts in the dropdown menu in the Orders tab, i should see all my accounts in the Positions tab too for example, but i dont.

3. An average value should still be exact down to the decimal places required for an instrument, if my avg price for an EUR/USD position is 1.4145, it shouldnt display 1.41. I suspect this breaks also the open PL display, which doesnt work at all.

4. Thanks

5. Ok, thanks

6. I think this is very inconvinient, and there should be an option to limit this to the selected sub-account. For example, i have my longer term trades in one account, and do my short term trades in another.

7. This may be an Oanda API issue and not a Quotetrader issue. I talked to other API users, and was told Oanda doesnt use "push"-prices, it is only possible to poll oanda-quotes every x milliseconds.

[eSignal_AlexM]

We've compared QT against java Oanda client and see no differencies in quote speed updates. They not always show the same values but once price establishes for at least several seconds they got synchonized.

2. Filters in the account manager is more like filters in Excel - if you have 3 rows in order tab and each row has 'ACC1' in account column you will see only 'ACC1' as the available choice in filter.

3. We will think on rounding average price to conform price scale.

6. I understand and agree with you. We will think on changing its behaviour.

So the summary is:
1. Slow order executions. Will check how to improve this.

2. Open PL should be fixed in November build.

3. Crash when using Stop order. Will check this.

4. Product management is reviewing your reports on average price and the flatten button.

[eSignal_AlexM]

Just an update.

1. Slow order execution will be fixed in December build.

2. Open PL will be fixed in December build.

3. Crash using Stop order will be fixed in December build.

4. We are not going to round average position price by default. However you are able to do it yourself by replacing field definition file with this one:
http://esignaldev.com/quotetrader/fields.xml

5. "Flatten All" will be applied to selected accounts only. Will be implemented in December build.

[Purri]

Thanks. Nice to see that the developers are responsive to suggestions.