Lawrence Chan of NeoTicker answers our questions

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michal.kreslik
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Postby michal.kreslik » Mon Jul 10, 2006 12:39 am

Lawrence Chan wrote:I think I finally answered all the questions from the initial post of this thread

If you have more questions, just ask.


I have just returned from Italy, so I couldn't respond to the answers sooner.

First of all, I would like to thank you very much for your quick and competent answers here on the forums.

If NeoTicker's development and support team is only half that quick and competent in responding to the clients' needs, Neo must be the best platform around, indeed.

Good job, thanks again!

Lawrence Chan wrote:the indicator engine works like an OS and you can effectively write your indicators written in any programming languages that utilize the core indicator object model.

Thus, feel free to use the programming language that you like, be that VC++, VB, Delphi, C#, VB.NET, etc. all works fine :)

The best thing is, your indicator written in a particular programming language will not affect its ability to be reused by any other indicators written for NeoTicker.

The key that glue it all together is the indicator object model.


This sounds almost too good to be true :)

So are we not tied to the Neo's development environment and can use Visual Studio 2005 .NET for example?

As I understand it, the core element and value of this whole approach is the object library & charting engine, written by TickQuest.

Are the objects in the library compiled as .NET objects or are they COM objects? Obviously, COM arch is obsolete nowadays.

Thanks,
Michal

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Postby Lawrence Chan » Mon Jul 10, 2006 3:59 pm

Thanks for the compliment.

About the development tools - yes you can use Visual Studio .Net.

At this point the objects are made available as COM objects, which allow for extremely fast performance when early binded into your indicator DLL.

The indicator objects are simply interface objects (3-tier design on almost everything in NeoTicker :)). When .Net performance continue to improve, we can offer .Net objects in parallel to the COM ones.
Lawrence Chan
TickQuest Inc.
http://www.tickquest.com

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Postby michal.kreslik » Mon Jul 10, 2006 6:31 pm

Thanks for the answer.

Anyway, pure .NET objects should cooperate much more efficiently with .NET objects compared to COM objects. There are no primitive HRESULTs in .NET thanks to the smooth, unified platform exception handling. You can use/inherit classes directly from the other objects within .NET - you can't do that with COM objects.

If we think of the COM objects as the individual divisions of a large company, then I would compare the outdatedness of the COM architecture to the company divisions' employees not being able to communicate with the other divisions' emplyees directly, but only via their highest bosses (the COM interface). This is the bottleneck of this approach.

Imagine the assistant of the sales person requesting a fax paper. She would call her boss, he would call his boss and he would call the sales boss. The sales boss would in turn forward this request to the financial planning boss (by using the COM interface) who would call his subordinate, she would call her subordinate, and finally the purchasing officer would order the coveted fax paper. Superfluous effort isn't it?

In .NET, the assistant calls directly the purchasing officer (the class from another .NET object) without bothering the highest bosses (the COM interface). Upon authorization her request is in accordance with written internal rules, she gets her fax paper in a fraction of time and stress.

I picture the COM versus the .NET object communication models like this:



I am sure you should consider making the objects available as .NET objects, unless you have some special reason for not disclosing the internal classes used to build the objects. After all, recompiling COM as .NET objects should not take much work, especially if your internal development environment is .NET regardless of the progamming language used.

Anyway, what is the internal development environment for the COM objects at Tickquest?

Thank you,
Michal

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Postby Lawrence Chan » Mon Jul 10, 2006 10:31 pm

NeoTicker is not developed with .Net due to performance requirement.

The introduction of .Net indicator objects will be subjected to where Microsoft is heading for the .Net strategy.

We added support of VBScript back in NeoTicker v1 and then MS simply dropped the development effort. Not a very nice experience :(
Lawrence Chan

TickQuest Inc.

http://www.tickquest.com

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Postby JPT » Mon Jul 10, 2006 11:48 pm

Lawrence, thank you for your time in answering questions:

Here are some of my concerns.

I am an engineer but with a hardware background, not software. Also it has been many years that I have had any software training.

Now I have managed to learn to use DBASE, MetaStock, now TradeStation and of course during my career I had to use FORTRAN and Basic for some real time simulations that I had to write.

In coverting from TradeStation (3 years of effort) to your platform I have down loaded both Delphi and the free C# from Microsoft.

First, what language would you suggest I become familiar with for NeoTicker.? It seems that C# will be easier for me to pick.

The Second major concern is that converting the "core" or proprietary portion of the strategy or indicator is not what is bothering me. Those sections are usually very simple minded and only 20 lines of code or less. What really takes the time is the "wrapper" that one has to put around the code to make a "robust" strategy run in the real world.

Things like:

What I am thinking about is to have code "snippets" for things like
end of day close outs
optimizing on start times, lunch times, dinner times, closing times, etc.
Some simple pyramiding schemes for trade sizing, like when you have X profit, you add Y contracts, .....
ATR based stops
ATR based profit targets
parabolic trailing stops
How to put debug statements into the strategy?

Kind of like a strategy shell that anyone converting from TS could easily use in NeoTicker.

The issue is that stops, exits at various times, and the like are all available already coded by someone in TS.

Of course it has taken me three years to get a shell with money managment that I like. Is there any such things already converted to languages that NT supports?

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Regards

Jim

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Postby brwkem » Tue Jul 11, 2006 6:12 pm

One irritating limitation with neo when do evaluation is the demo doesnt really give you any idea on how your setup will work with your particuliar vendor. Most software offers 30 day trial beyond the demo, if available, but with neo there isnt any such offer. So to fully evaluate how neo works with your vendor you have to fork out $100 setup plus $90 per month. A major flaw imo. On top of that; if you decide to buy a permanent license you then have to fork out andother 1297. The 190 doesnt go toward any other purchase.

brwkem

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Postby Lawrence Chan » Tue Jul 11, 2006 9:35 pm

brwkem wrote:One irritating limitation with neo when do evaluation is the demo doesnt really give you any idea on how your setup will work with your particuliar vendor. Most software offers 30 day trial beyond the demo, if available, but with neo there isnt any such offer. So to fully evaluate how neo works with your vendor you have to fork out $100 setup plus $90 per month. A major flaw imo. On top of that; if you decide to buy a permanent license you then have to fork out andother 1297. The 190 doesnt go toward any other purchase.

brwkem


The demo version of NeoTicker is fully functional.
There is just a few basic limitations like limited # of windows that you can open.
Lawrence Chan

TickQuest Inc.

http://www.tickquest.com

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Postby Lawrence Chan » Tue Jul 11, 2006 9:48 pm

JPT wrote:
<snip>

a. First, what language would you suggest I become familiar with for NeoTicker.? It seems that C# will be easier for me to pick.

b. Of course it has taken me three years to get a shell with money managment that I like. Is there any such things already converted to languages that NT supports?


a. If you do not use complex position management, learn the formula language first :)

There is no real preference for which programming language to use.

b. It is pretty easy to do what you said in formula.

To do the same in IDL indicators, you need to understand the fundamental difference in NeoTicker's concept of trading system from TS. NeoTicker has a full featured order placement core that emulate a real trading account. In short, you manage your orders as if you are managing your real life trading activities.

I have posted some example systems with various MM concepts written in formula. I think we can provide more examples using IDL in the future.
Lawrence Chan

TickQuest Inc.

http://www.tickquest.com

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Postby aspTrader » Thu Jul 13, 2006 12:51 pm

Lawrence Chan wrote:
JPT wrote:
<snip>

a. First, what language would you suggest I become familiar with for NeoTicker.? It seems that C# will be easier for me to pick.


a. If you do not use complex position management, learn the formula language first :)

JPT,

Regarding the choice of programming languages I would say this....

If I'm reading your note correctly, I take it that you do have some relatively sophisticated set of structures for doing Position Management in TS. If my reading is correct, then, I believe the clear best path is to start with Delphi Script. Taking that path sets you up for plenty of upside growth to using the Delphi IDE or .NET down the road.

The NeoTicker Trade object is a powerful thing. You can do just about anything you've ever imagined should be doable with a "Trade object". You're going to want to see examples of how things can be done and there are more Delphi Script examples than of any other kind.

For a quick review of the NeoTicker Trade object documentation take a look here.

With regard to specfics, I have put NeoTicker code in the public domain which manages non-continuous "TradingTimeStatus".

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Postby michal.kreslik » Thu Jul 13, 2006 10:16 pm

Lawrence,

is the EFX/Neo interface source code publicly available? As far as I've found, EFX Level II data is not accessible thru Neo, so I would like to modify the interface code to make it available.

Michal

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