Questions-for-Live-Auto-traders-Strategy-Monitor-vs-Quotes-window-for-live-trading

QUOTE:
Which do you use and what do you find to be the pluses and minuses?

Quotes Window - For triggering orders from EOD Stop/Limit strategies
Strategy Monitor - For Intraday trading DataSets of symbols. Even if you use the S. Monitor for EOD Stop/Limit signals, you'd probably send those to the Quotes tool for triggering.

QUOTE:
If I have a strategy that monitors 200 symbols for buy signals, does it make more sense to use the strategy or quotes monitor?

See above. If you have the EOD Stop/Limit signals, then clearly you'd use the Quotes Window.

QUOTE:
Does anyone implement specialized stops with the strategy monitor?

What are "specialized stops"?

QUOTE:
Do I need a separate version of my daily strategy to be able to use the strategy monitor for purchases?

No. But there's no concept of a Portfolio in the S. Monitor - each symbol is run individually - so you're limited to Fixed dollar/share sizing there. Say you use 5% sizes. Each day (or week), you'd look at your account size (say $100K), multiply it by 5% ($5K) and enter that dolllar value for the S. Monitor sizing. Be careful changing sizing with live positions though, until we get a Portfolio Sync implemented.

QUOTE:
Does the strategy monitor prevent buying the same signal over and over?

Define "same signal". Example, you place a Buy at limit order at 23.45 and the trade fills. If the strategy places another Buy at limit order at 23.45 on the next bar, sure, it can fill too.

Ok, thank you for explaining.

A Specialized stop I had coded for WL6 was a limit-trailing-stop. Rather than just put a limit, it would trigger a stop when the limit was reached. If it continued past that stop by a parameter percent then it would turn into a trailing stop.

The idea being that If a stock opens up higher than your limit, you let it ride throughout the day while protecting gains.

The programmer had to make it a minute chart on strategy monitor but I never got a chance to implement it. I don't know how to make a strategy know to sell if it never buys. The buys are based on limits that get triggered during the day. So... If I only use quote monitor I can't do my limit-trailing-stop. If I use strategy monitor, if I'm using minute bars I need to make sure it doesn't take on the same position multiple times during the day since the limit exists throughout the day so is theoretically the same for every bar with strategy monitor.

If people are able to use strategy monitor to just signal a daily buy signal once then it may make more sense for me to use that.

Brokers implement conditions and trailing stops in different ways. At least for now, running your conditional stop in an intraday strategy is the right way to go. The only trick is to make your live intraday exit strategy know about the EOD positions.

Option 1 -
Trigger your EOD entry signals using the Quotes tool, and add some code to the EOD strategy save new positions to a file. Pick up those positions with the intraday exit script, which would create hypothetical positions to use for exit signals.

Option 2 -
Put all strategy logic (entry and exit) in an intraday strategy and run it in the Strategy Monitor. This strategy would trigger entries using daily indicators - that's easy to do too. See the examples for BarHistoryCompressor/Synchronizer an TimeSeriesCompressor/Synchronizer.

Ok that's what I figured but was hoping someone may have come up with a better solution.

Thanks