Advanced Trading Functionality

Basket Trading

The basket trading module is now available for customers for an additional subscription (price will be given soon). This new functionality requires access to Trading (Order Entry). Note that not all providers support Basket Trading – contact your broker.

Simple basket trading

In its simplest form, basket trading can be viewed as a way of defining any number of orders locally that can be sent to the order entry server in one go – a basket of orders. There are several ways of defining the orders, their types and acceptable price. To open a new Basket Trading window you select File | New | Basket Trading (or select Basket Trading from the right click menu of the Order Status window). You are required to login to your order entry provider.

Creating, editing and deleting orders

The window has a simple toolbar at the top and a grid with columns and rows below. Use the edit field and Add button to add new symbols to the basket – just as you would in the Composite window. Pressing Add without entering any value in the edit box will allow you to perform a symbol search. To delete an order in the list, select it and press the Delete button (or press Shift+Del). Once you have one or more symbols in the basket you can adjust the orders’ volume, open volume and price directly in the grid. Alternatively you can use right-click, Edit Order (or press Ctrl+Enter) to edit the current order in a familiar order entry-like dialog. When you are satisfied with the orders you can send them as one basket with the Execute Basket button in the toolbar. Note that a basket must be given a name – so that you can recognize the live orders and trades it will generate.

Saving and opening lists

Once you have defined a basket trading list you can save it for later use. Press the Save List button in the toolbar, or use the right click menu List | Save list and List | Save List as... commands. To open a previously stored list, use the Open List button.

Using price sources

Often, when you are reusing a previously saved basket trading list, storing absolute values in the Price column of each order is awkward. Typically the current market price for the symbols has moved, and you need to manually update the price to something more acceptable.

To relieve you of this extra work, we have a concept of price source and price delta – as you can see in the Source and Delta columns, respectively. The Source column lets you choose from a list of market values (last, bid, ask, mid, vwap). The current market value of that field is shown in the MarketPrice column and copied to the Price column. You can use the Delta column to adjust the Price above or below the market price. As the market changes, the Price will always be equal to MarketPrice + Delta.

To go back to setting manual prices, set Source to Custom. This disables the Delta column and allows you to directly set the Price. Note that the default value of the Source column is defined in the Tools | Order Entry settings.

Distributing a fixed amount

Some times you have a fixed amount of money that you want to use for buy or sell orders. As long as all the symbols in the basket list use the same trading currency, the program can help you distribute an amount on all the orders.

To facilitate this, the amount edit, currency indicator and Distribute button on the toolbar is used. When distributing, the price you have configured for each symbol is used and a new volume is calculated. You can use the Weight column to set the relative weight (value) that symbol will be given.

Another factor that influence how the volumes are calculated, is the Distribute Value Volume rounding field in the Basket Trading page of the Tools | Order Entry settings dialog. The possible values are None, Down to Boardlot, Nearest Boardlot and Up to Boardlot. Depending on this setting the total value of the orders can be very close to, or slightly below or above the target amount.

Currently, the Distribute functionality is disabled if you have more than one trading currency in the orders list.

Importing and exporting

In more advanced cases, you or your customers have defined a list of orders that should be executed in an external system, such as Excel. In these cases the import and export functionality available in the Basket Trading window comes in handy.

A basket trading list can be imported via an external text file or via the clipboard. In both cases the data must be formatted in a simple tab-separated text format. The details of this format can be found here .

To import from the clipboard, use right-click List | Import from clipboard (or the shortcut Shift+Ctrl+V).

To export to the clipboard use right-click List | Export selected orders to clipboard (or the shortcut Shift+Ctrl+C).

To import from a text file, use right-click List | Import from file. To export to a text file, use right-click List | Export to file.

See more information about Basket Trading import format

Copy and Paste

The clipboard export and import commands also make it easy to duplicate one or more orders inside a basket list. This can be useful when you have defined orders that you want to duplicate and then make small changes to (for instance, change the portfolio name).

The Include field and disabled orders

You might notice that some orders in you basket list are grayed out. This happens when one or more of the following conditions are not met:

• The symbol has been identified by the program
• Price has been set (or the order type does not require a price)
• Volume has been set
• Portfolio has been set
• Included column is checked

The basket cannot be executed until all orders are valid. Orders that don’t have the Included column checked will be ignored for distribution and execution.

Available columns

The Basket Trading window comes configured with a certain set of columns as default, but you can easily change this by right-clicking the columns, selecting Field Chooser and use drag-and-drop on the columns you want.

Most of the columns are self-explanatory or have been discussed above. The Custom#1-Custom#6 fields are used for custom fields defined by the order entry provider for that specific market. It is easiest to use the Edit Order (Ctrl+Enter) command to set these fields.