TickQuest

A Financial Technology Company

technologies you can profit from

Solution for Forex Traders

Forex market is the largest market in the world. Forex traders around the world spend countless hours to improve their trading methods to stay profitable in this highly competitive arena. With NeoTicker, forex traders can now shorten the amount of time needed to refine their methods with better results - reducing both stress and potential costly errors in executions.

Assistance to Discretionary Trading

Many discretionary traders like monitoring the markets for the specific trading setups they can identify visually. That is something not a simple trading model can replace as the experience of the trader can take into account many factors to make better decisions.

To help traders monitor many currency pairs at the same time, NeoTicker can display the traders' favourite indicators within the quote windows and dynamic tables. Special conditions can be defined to produce visual and audio alerts. Traders can greatly reduce the need to flip through many charts in real-time for next potential trade, and focus on the pairs that fulfilled the basic requirements.

Qualify New Trading Setups Quickly

From concepts to making a trading model prototype, can be accomplished quickly with NeoTicker's formula language. New trading ideas can be tested quickly with detail performance reports generated automatically. Making it possible to decide early if further efforts should be spent to pursuit an idea.

Data Integration with Your Brokerage

For forex brokers directly supported by NeoTicker, traders can stream real-time quotes from their brokers' software/server into NeoTicker, removing the need of a 3rd party data services. As many forex traders know, the quote from your brokerage is better for your decision making than the combined quotes obtained across many brokers.

For forex brokers not directly supported by NeoTicker, as long as they provide connection thru Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) or Excel, NeoTicker can utlize their real-time quotes.

Stock trading is unique that its traders can pick the best opportunities among all the stocks to trade as oppose to being forced to trade the same instrument everyday knowing that there may not be favorable setups to work with.

NeoTicker has many features designed for stock traders to automate and simplify their daily tasks.

Automate Your Daily Routines

Everyday stock traders tend to flip through thousands of charts to look for trading opportunities. Why torture yourself this way? Using Pattern Scanner window in NeoTicker, you can specify criteria that filter out most of the stocks that you do not need to review and spend more time on the candidates that are more likely to enter your watch list for the next trading day.

Better yet, you can define multiple Pattern Scanners to search for different sets of criteria, making it much easier to seek for the best trading opportunities.

Ultra Fast Real-Time Scanning

Daytraders like finding opportunities within a trading session. NeoTicker's pattern scanners can scan for trading setups in intraday timeframes during the day at your customized schedule or timer, giving you the ability to find more trading opportunities beyond end-of-day scans.

Beyond Scanning - Tick by Tick Update on Indicators and Real-Time Filtering

When you are exploiting trading opportunities at very high intraday resolution, entering the high frequency trading territories, you will be glad to know that NeoTicker's quote windows and dynamic tables are capable of tracking indicators and your custom calculations as frequently as you need.

That gives you the ability to track a set of symbols, using quote window formulas and dynamic tables and identify trading opportunities as soon as they happen, nothing can work faster than that.

Improve Your Research and Development Cycle

Existing price patterns exploiting certain structural bias will stop working when the necessary pre-conditions changed. New patterns in turn will emerge and become detectable. For stock traders, it is important to know, before engaging in a trade, how well the particular setup works on the stock statistically. Being able to monitor the performance of your current bag of tricks can help you determine if a particular trading setup should be retired and replaced with another one.

Using NeoTicker, a user can find out exactly how well a particular trading setup works on the individual stock when it shows up in your scan. Giving you the ability to tell if the setup is working consistently at the moment or a warning flag is showing as there is a decline in performance lately.

As you need to retire trading setups consistently, you also need to develop new trading setups frequently to keep up with your trading performance. NeoTicker is extremely useful in the development front of scanners. Potential trading setups that you see in the charts can be defined and quantified quickly, allowing you to adapt to the ever changing trading environment quickly.

Are you having problems with:

  • Dropped ticks
  • Delayed ticks
  • Crashes
  • Lock ups
  • Top-of-the-line computer, mediocre performance

And the problems worsen when you track more symbols? It's likely that the problems are caused by incompatibilities among your trading platform and your computer.

The Cause

Charting programs originated in 2000s or earlier, were written with old computers in mind. Because personal computers at that era were not good at multi-tasking, early charting programs are single threaded. These programs worked okay in that era because computerized trading was not wide spread and market activities were low.

Fast forward to present. Most traders now trade with computers and specifically, through the Internet. Analysis is done faster. Orders are placed faster. This creates a surge in trading volume. It's now common for an active stock to generate half million trades per day. Such high trading volume is unprecedented just a few years ago.

Old charting programs, entry-level applications, and bundled solutions are not prepared to handle such extreme volume, period. Problems surface when you needed your application most, like during the time when the market activities is reaching its peak. The symptoms are clear - single threaded (and most badly designed) programs will drop and/or delay ticks. Some even crash.

Buying a faster computer does not solve the problem. The inefficiencies are there within those trading applications, not the computer.

NeoTicker® Advantage

NeoTicker® is a modern multithreaded application designed to handle intensive data load in real-time by fully utilizing the latest CPU technologies. It is created from ground up for real-time intraday charting and data processing.

Most of its peers are developed for end-of-day usage and later modified into processing real-time data, hoping that their applications would still hold up. Existence of such software is an insult to the intelligence of the general public and irresponsibilities of the developers.

To process data the right way, workload has to be spreaded across multiple threads. Each thread should be responsible for a relatively simple task. Because the tasks are simple, the threads practically run simultaneously in real-time.

For effective real-time performance, NeoTicker® has proprietary load balancing technology to ensure every thread is well behaved and consume computer resources in a reasonable manner.

The result is ultra smooth real-time performance only NeoTicker® can deliver.

multi-threadReduce Data Delay

NeoTicker® uses separate threads to handle distribution of ticks.

After the receiving thread receives a tick, the distribution thread takes over almost instantaneously to distribute the tick to individual windows.

Because the time spent on distribution of data is minimized, ticks are rarely delayed, even in the busiest market.

Data Robustness

For each thread, there is a dynamically adjusted queue for buffering data. If the computer is too busy to handle a tick, the tick will be stored in the queue and no data will be lost

Effective Use of Your Hardware Investments

You don't need a high-end computer to run NeoTicker®. NeoTicker® is very efficient. For average users, a mid-range computer is more than sufficient.

If you require heavy computation, you will be gladed that NeoTicker® can effectively utilize the latest hardware. NeoTicker®'s multithreaded architecture fully utilizes the hardware that is built-on multiple virtual or physical CPU's. There is a marked performance improvements when you run NeoTicker® on multiple core computers.

programminglevels

NeoTicker® implements trading models in a formal manner. A unified framework handles all trading related activities - trade simulation, trading systems, brokerage interface. This unified framework gives you the ideal balance between ease of use, flexibility and consistency.

Framework Overview

The framework on trading models is divided into three logical elements. All three elements are linked by a common real-time database:


transactionoriented_large

  • Order issuers, e.g. manual order entries, trading systems
  • Order processor, e.g. NeoTicker® Order Processing Engine, interface to real-life broker
  • Queries - system performance viewer, trading systems that rely on results of other trading system
    The database is responsible for storing orders, transactions and positions. The database makes sophisticated queries into trading history possible.




Trading Systems

Simply put, NeoTicker®'s trading system architecture is the most powerful and flexible one in the market today. No other software gives you the combined power and consistency NeoTicker® offers.

NeoTicker® is designed for real-time deployment. Your trading systems will run with the same level of performance in real-time as in historical testing.

In summary, NeoTicker®'s trading system architecture gives you the following benefits:

  • Based on our unique indicator framework - trading systems have access to advanced indicator features such as compress series, tick update, indicator-on-indicator and more
  • You have a variety of ways to implement trading systems, from Backtest EZ where no programming is required, to easy-to-use formulas, to flexible scripting languages and external programs though IDL interface
  • At the point evaluation - it is impossible to accidentally peek into the future and create an unsound trading system
  • Portfolio support for all order commands without explicit symbol switching
  • Query into database to implement order management and dynamically adjust trading systems' behavior based on trading history

Order Processing Engine

NeoTicker®'s Order Processing Engine processes orders from Trade Simulator and trading systems. The engine supports many order types and provides realistic order filling at tick level.

Order processing generates transactions, which are logged into database so you can easily evaluate trading performance.

Benefits:

  • Maximum consistency between orders filled by different parts of trading framework
  • Tick level processing for historical and real-time tick data
  • Order types supported - fill or kill, day, good 'til cancel
  • Tick level fill type - fill by tick, fill by bid/ask
  • Non-tick level fill types - exact, average or worst price

API for Brokerage Interface

Our team works with brokers to provide interface to place orders from NeoTicker®.

When brokerage interface is enabled, orders are routed to the broker for processing. If the broker provides order status, you have the choice to use the broker's order status instead of Order Processing Engine for actual filled prices.

System Performance Viewer

System Performance Viewer utilizes the database to query historical trading performance. Because the database logs all orders, transactions and positions, sophisticated query is possible. System Performance Viewer can produce comprehensive trading reports.

Here is a sample list of reports available in System Performance Viewer:

  • Trading summaries for everything in portfolio
  • Order list and distribution
  • Transaction list and trade price distribution
  • Position list and statistics
  • Runs and equity change distributions
  • User defined custom statistics

Release note is available from our blog site.

Download available from Support/Download area.

Release note is available from our blog site.

Download available from Support/Download area.

Time series transformation theory meets with non-conventional charting styles

The timeless Point and figure charting, the Japanese Renko or Three Line Break, are all excellent concepts that transform the underlying price data information into something that encapsulate specific principles in price movements, giving the user of such charting style a different perspective into the price history.

At TickQuest, we successfully modernized and unified the concept of time series transformations into a programming framework where users can easily implement various kinds of transformations, from the classic ones, to highly customized ones designed by the users.

Promotes Consistencies in Transformation Rules

Most charting platforms do not handle non-conventional charting style consistently over historical data and real-time updates. Designers and programmers of these platforms do not have the expertise in financial data processing, thus failing to understand the importance of consistencies in generating these charts is very important.

Super position technology formalizes the transformation rules, making it possible to generate good consistent specialize charting (i.e point and figure, renko, three line break, volume range, momentum bar, etc.) based on a base data series specification, across both historical data and real-time updates.

Promotes Innovations thru Plug-in Architecture

Super position is extensible through plug-ins created by users or third party developers. Researchers can now easily specify transformation rules that can be implemented into programming code for practical usage without ambiguity. Potentially better ways in data representation can be researched and developed in the future at a much faster pace.

Improves Consistencies in Trading Model Backtesting

Specialized charting has always suffered in terms of trading model development. Trading rules have never been easily defined for non-fundamental charting styles. For example, a point and figure chart cannot be properly backtested with rules based on its bars only because too much information regarding the underlying price series is missing. Orders just cannot be filled at the price you think possible with the point and figure bars.

With super position technology, system developers can now easily develop trading models to overcome this kind of issues and backtest with confidence that they can get consistencies on any kind of custom charting styles in their backtesting process.

Ever imagine that you can replay the markets in front of you tick-by-tick, in the complete real-time trading environment you have created or customized, as if you are replaying a video?

Our environment simulation technology can do exactly that, with advanced features allowing you to play, pause, fast forward market data as if you are replay a video. You can even replay at the smallest possible resolution of one tick at a time (just like replaying video frame by frame).

There are many exciting applications with this useful technology. Here are some examples.

Streamline the Trader Training Process

All forms of attempts to replay the markets exist. From trying to watch a historical chart and scrolling that manually bar by bar from left to right, to simple automation tools adding bars to a chart one bar at a time. Countless number of people has spent millions of hours doing just that, so that they can train themselves without the benefit of peeking into the future on a chart with all the outcomes already presented itself to them.

That helps but not quite enough. Historical chart on a single instrument does not reflect the proper environment, or the setting, when the price series was developed. Short of those information, you are justifying the price actions and behaviour on a chart as if that is the only factor that matters.

Maybe. Maybe not. If you do believe that markets are inter-related and that the scenario at the time an instrument was traded would determine the outcome with greater accuracy, then, replaying the history of a single instrument is not the answer.

Our environment simulation tackle this exact problem by replaying the complete market environment you deem important for your decision making. That means, you can see the markets replay themselves in front of you in concert, as if you are monitoring them in real-time.

Improve the Indicator Design and Development Cycle

When designing a new indicator, one of the major obstacles is making the indicator responsive at the right time under the right condition. Using purely historical data with OHLC bars, the actual real-time development of the indicator values are not available for the indicator designer to verify the stability of their works.

With our technology, indicator developers can replay the data one tick at a time, and check on the behaviour of their work easily.

Efficient Pre-Deployment Analysis of Trading Models

Before a trading model goes live, be that manual order entry or fully automated system, test drive time period has to be spent on monitoring the real-time behaviour of the model, before actual deployment takes place. During such time period, order placement expectations, special situation handling logic, etc. will be added to the model based on potential issues observed during the test drive.

With environment simulation, one can efficiently stress test a trading model, without waiting until the test drive time period to figure out the potential problematic situations. Better model can be built and shorten the time requirement for test drive.