So I've switched my funds from Equities account over to my Futures account and gotten a Real Time Data Feed account. So I have the chart and chart trading setup. I am on my Sim account trying to get familiar with it. I have "@ES" as the chart symbol. It shows "@ES 5 min [CME] E-mini S&P Continuous Contract [Jun20]" in the title bar of the chart. However, everytime I try to go place a trade it gives me the same error message "INVALID FUTURES SYMBOL". So I went to live chat and the rep was pretty useless. They tell me "@ES is not a tradable symbol" then immediately follow up with "I will have to get someone to call you back which could take up to 1 to 2 business days. Maybe longer with the pandemic." The customer service on there is extremely lacking as it took over a week to get an email reply from them my prior attempt. If anyone here is familiar with Tradestation and the setup your help would be greatly appreciated.
Check for the specific month’s contract you want to trade, each month has a separate symbol code: https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/ Micro contracts might be prudent to get your feet wet with. I have had 10X faster response with TS user forums at their website. T
Ahhh the forums didn't even occur to me. I think you are right on the month code being the problem. I have to wait until 5pm to see if so. I'm amazed at how shitty their customer service is. Their product/ service is stellar. The service rep I signed up with is my only lifeline to customer service but I just emailed him and it could be a few hours, although he is very communicative and helpful. I've just never dealt with customer service as poor as their normal (outside of the sales rep I deal with there) normal team. It's basically nonexistent to the point I've received better service at places like the DMV. After doing an online check it appears to be universal and not just me. Update - That was the problem thank you for your help.
Glad that helped! Here is some direct insight to what I have seen recently with TS10. I went with TS because they have the raw data, autotrading software and brokerage wrapped up in one bundle. Speed to getting a trading system up and get my capital working was my main driver. The few test trades I performed showed the brokerage/manual order entry fast and slick. I'm almost 4 mo in on learning TS/EasyLanguage from scratch with the intent to mechanize my trading and take majority of my (huge) human error out of my trading. I've been trading and programming in the real time enviro 25+ years. My TS account exec is decent and the tech support guys on the forum are well above average in knowledge and response time. Many times I get same day responses which is great this day and age. Account service for the way I use it is 9/10. There have been painful times using EL/TS due to wonky charts and relatively arbitrary limitations costing me a bunch of wasted time. IE ... I have noticed a few times that the most recent candle is not anchored to the right side of a chart and will just march off the right side of the screen. I had a trendline alert occur today and when I looked at the chart, I had to jiggle the scroll bar (which was already entirely to the right) to get the current bar to become visible again. Also, if you use the 'squeeze' button to compress the bars, the chart is anchored to the left rather than right side. Click enough and the chart gets squz up on the left side with most of the screen blank. Jiggling the slider (that is already fully right) will get the screen filled again. That behavior should be an easy fix. That it made it into production tells me that their current programmers don't actually use their own software to trade because these basic GUI programming misbehaviors are annoying as hell. I am keeping my previous charting package on subscription, because it functions very cleanly without a dozen extra jiggles per chart I want to view. I go through a ton of charts all day long and this misbehavior eats me alive. I tried putting together a dual instrument strategy to trade two correlated instruments. I found you can apply a trade strategy to the first (data1) instrument, but not the second one. I also found out that you are prohibited from performing intrabar order generation AT ALL on "dual" data charts, but you can for single instrument charts. I'm just starting to figure how I am going to work around that, but having a strategy with 30 min bars that must wait for the end of that bar to launch an order clearly isn't workable. if you have a trigger condition a couple min into a 30 min bar, the market isn't going to wait 28 min for your software to get an order out at the end of the bar. There may be something I am missing in terms of an alternate way, but if you try to start a strategy with IOGeneration enabled in your EL code on a chart with more than one instrument, TS will turn your strategy right off and pop up the error log saying you've been summarily disabled. Thanks for playing. TIP: If you attempt any strategy or special indicator work ... stop ... and search out & become an expert in "maxbarsback" for TS charts. This little gremlin running around in the background will eat you alive if you don't get out in front of it. This is a process that has to be cared for manually in TS. I've had several charting packages and all of them automatically took care of not drawing indicators or triggering until enough bars are available for a computation. For not being easier and more bulletproof, right now, I have to rate TS/EL10xx 4/10 for my needs. Hope to see some improvement at some point. I had hoped to be up and auto trading by now, but these workarounds are costing me 2-3 months of trading with their software. Not to mention trying to continue discretionary trading w my old broker while trying to get a workable strategy up and running. IMHO, there is a problem here from an architecture/GUI perspective or new revision performance situation. I would be happy to pay a couple hundred a year towards the software platform so they could get a trader/programmer on staff that personally used the software. From the outside looking in and what I have heard others say, it appears that mgmt views TS 'free' software as a loss leader to get trades into the brokerage and not a revenue center or at least neutral, breakeven center ... or as I have found with other brokers ... management sees discretionary traders as their 80% and algo folks like me as the 20%. Hope I am wrong because I think mechanical eventually will be the only sensible way to deal with the trading day. All that said, this route is still probably going to be faster than me duplicating a lot of what they already have working with my own code. We will see in a few more months. That is always the fallback. T
I usually just grab the selection of candles and drag them left so I always have the most recent candle in the center of the screen with empty space to the right.
If you trade from a chart or if you want the same symbol on your Matrix (DOM), you can use the following type of contract: @ESU20 In that case, your continuous contract will expire in the middle of September like the traditional ESU20. Adding the "@" to your front month contract will also give you a continuous contract. Best of all, this will make your continuous contract, tradable.
This is the front month contract. It will expire the 18th of September. Adding "@" will make it continuous from more than 30y to the expiration date. Hope it helps. Good trades!
Is the continuous contract a newer concept (last few years)? I traded oil futures in 2016 on Ninja Trader and remember needing to move to new contracts before each expiry date. I feel as though I'd have heard about such a thing back then had it existed.
Not sure for other trading platforms, but I think it is a Tradestation (very useful) thing. And you still need to move to the "new contract" (rollover) around the 14th of September if you want to trade the most open interest and traded contract. So, the added "@" makes the front month contract continuous from about 30 years.