The following is an overview of the August 2018 update to Insider Bars and OF-G Suite.
One Indicator for Everything
A couple of years back, Insider Bars B was spun off from Insider Bars to permit adding functionality which did not easily fit into the original Insider Bars. This proved very confusing to new subscribers, and I’m happy to report that now everything can coexist in one indicator. With this month’s update, all mainstream Insider Bars functionality is available in Insider Bars B. The Insider Bars indicator will continue to be supported as a legacy version, but new development will focus on Insider Bars B. Likewise, online help and sample workspaces will only use Insider Bars B from now on.
Improved Tick/Volume Chart Accuracy with SDO
I have told you before about tick and volume chart problems with TradeStation’s Streaming Data Optimization (SDO). SDO is great for saving computer resources, but it was designed before modern volume @ price analysis was common. And the tick/volume chart version causes extensive errors in Insider Bars analysis. The only workaround has been to turn off SDO, but this dramatically increases computer CPU use. This month’s Insider Bars B update includes a new option for tick/volume chart users which dramatically improves accuracy without disabling SDO. What it does is to use a separate non-SDO data feed to update the analysis, rather than relying on the chart’s real-time data. This new set up is not perfect. You will still an occasional glitch when new bars are starting. But compared with before, it is a huge step forward. And with a little more time, I believe it can be made perfect — so there is no longer a need for anyone to turn off SDO.
Support for New TradeStation 10
You may have heard about TradeStation 10 and Direct 2D. Finally TS is going to support using our PC video cards — rather than relying on CPU for chart graphics. I have been using this for about a month now, and think it is the most important TS update in many years. What I have seen has been performance superior to anything I have ever seen in 9.5. It is very fast, and is rock solid. And the best news is that you don’t need an expensive graphic card to take advantage of it. I have been running a 4K monitor on my on-board Intel desktop graphics and performance is stellar. There still are a few bugs to be cleaned up, but I expect to switch my trading computer to TS 10 in the next month or so.
Direct 2D works differently than the GDI+ used in 9.5, so a number of Insider Bars software changes were necessary for users of TS 10. The most noticeable is that a new histogram font was required. A link for the new OFGHistogramC has been added to online help. If you are using TS 9.5, the old font will continue to work. However TS 10 users should download the new one for best results.
Details about the Update
There are a couple of things to be aware of with this update:
- New sample workspaces are now available. They work with TradeStation Version 9.5 Update 27 and higher (including any version of Version 10.)
- Some of you may run into problems with your existing Insider Bars B charts after the update. Quite literally, thousand lines of code were added/changed. So it is near impossible to make everything work exactly as it did before in an update of this magnitude. If anything looks funny, remove your indicator and add it back and you should be able to get everything working as it was. If you run into any problems, drop me a line and I can help you out.