What's New in 4.9

Market Window

Custom Background Color

It is now possible to define a custom background color for a symbol by selecting Properties | Symbol color from the right click menu.

Note: For strong background colors, the positive and negative change colors are disabled to enhance readability. if a soft pastel color is chosen, the positive and negative change coloring is retained.

To clear a custom background color, select Properties | Clear Symbol color.

Custom Symbol Description

It is now possible to define a custom description for a symbol by selecting Properties | Custom Symbol description from the right click menu. Custom symbol descriptions are persistent and will be used in all other window types.

Note: To reduce potential confusion all custom descriptions are indicated with an asterisk (*) prefix.

To return to the server-defined description select Properties | Clear Custom Description.

New Custom Headlines in the List Tab and Composite Window

Custom headlines may be inserted in the list tab and in the composite window by selecting Properties | Add Headline from the right click menu.

Custom headlines are also  supported and stored in symbol lists. The text and background color of all headlines can be customized in the Edit colors dialog.

Notice that in a list with headlines, sorting by clicking on the column captions have been disabled.

Compare studies

When you select a range of symbols in the market window, and bring up the right-click menu, there are now more options in the Chart menu. You can create Intraday and Historical compare charts with the following compare studies:

Export to Metastock

In the Export Symbol Data dialog, there is now an option to export to Metastock.

Symbol Window

Trades

The Trades Statistics at the bottom of the Trades page in the Symbol window, now includes both a VWAP and a VWAP All field.

The VWAP All field is the Volume Weighted Average Price for all today's or selected trades. The VWAP field only includes trades that have been traded On-floor.

Brokers

By default, the Brokers page in the Symbol window shows Broker Statistics for Today. Now there is a new Date Range menu option in the right-click menu, allowing you to change the period included in the statistics.

Consolidated Orderbook

Best bid & Offer %

The consolidated orderbook now includes a Best Bid & Offer % info bar that displays each symbol ranked by the percentage of time it has held the top position of the bid and ask sections. Note that the ranking is calculated from the time the consolidated orderbook window is opened. A value of 100% means that the symbol has been in the top level of both the bid and ask section the whole period.

Notice that since multiple symbols often are at the top level of the orderbook at the same time, the sum of the percentages will typically be above 100.

Trades Outside Bid/Ask Spread

Trades outside the bid/ask spread are now marked with a user configurable background color.

Double Click Action for Volume Distribution Bars

Double clicking the trade volume distribution bar now opens the symbol window with the trades tab displayed. For the order volume distribution bar the orderbook is displayed.

Info Bar Preference Settings

The info bar preference settings have been changed to control the visibility of the info bar instead of controlling the expand/collapse state.

Broker Statistics

New Symbol Turnover % column

There is now a new column called Symbol Turnover Percent. This column is only applicable for time period Today in the Single Broker page. The column calculates the percentage of market share the broker has in that symbol today (the Broker's Total Turnover as a percentage of the symbol's Turnover).

Note that because all trade turnovers are calculated twice in the Broker Statistics module (buy side + sell side), the formula used to calculate the Symbol Turnover % column is:

 Symbol Turnover % = Broker's Turnover * 100 / ( Symbol's Turnover * 2)

Market Pages

You can now double click on a symbol caption in the market pages to display the symbol window.

The market pages now also supports linking.

Chart

Free zoom

By default the zooming function only zooms the time axis and auto-calculates the value axis. By holding down the <Alt> key while zooming, you can now force the zoom to the box you are selecting.

Drag and drop to add compare studies

You can now drag-and-drop a single or a selected list of symbols to the chart window to add a number of compare studies. When dragging a single symbol, the <Ctrl> key must be pressed - otherwise it will change the main symbol in the chart.

Target currency

You can now convert the main line in the chart to a different currency, by selecting Target Currency from the right-click menu.

Notice that the conversion is done by dividing the symbol price line with the corresponding currency cross symbol from the World Forex feed.

Default line chart color

The default color for the line chart is now configurable from the Chart Setup dialog.

Compare with other fields

It is now possible to do compare charts with other fields that the Last field. The default field is the same field as used for the main line.

For instance, the chart above compares the yield prices of the Icelandic Bonds.

Order Entry

Improved GUI in Order Status Window

The Order status window now has an improved GUI using toolbars and new style controls for a unified, compact and more modern look.

The Portfolio header grid has been replaced with a more flexible info bar.

The Orders, Trades, Accumulated Trades and Portfolio tabs now includes easy access to a selection to predefined layouts.

Inline modification of Orders

There is now a new option in the Tools | Order Entry | Orders Status settings page: [X] Allow inline modification of order.

When this option is on, you can modify the volume or price of an active order directly in the orders list of the Order Status window. Click on the field (or use arrows to select it and press F2) and it will go into edit mode where you can type in a new volume or use the arrow buttons to change it up or down.
 

The first time you inline modify an order, you will get a notification that the order will be modified.

You can disable further notifications by checking the [X] Don't show this message again checkbox.

Delete All, Delete Buy, Delete Sell

In addition to the existing Delete button (that will delete the one or more selected orders), we have now added separate delete buttons to delete all orders or to delete all active buy or sell orders.

This makes it easy to quickly remove yourself from the market when needed.

Turn Sell order and Turn Buy order

Sometimes when you want quickly turn your position in the market, you may want to simply "turn" existing orders (changing from buy to sell or vice versa) instead of deleting orders and inserting new ones. To support this there is now a new option to do exactly this. The new Turn Buy and Turn Sell buttons in the Orders page of the Order Status window are available if you have checked the [X] Support Turn Order buttons checkbox in the Order Status settings.

Accumulate by Execution Market

The Accumulated Trades page of the Order Status window now supports a new column called Execution Market. For order entry providers that support Smart Orders that may be routed to and executed on multiple exchanges, the Execution Market will contain the ID of the exchange the execution occurred on. When multiple Execution Markets are accumulated into one line, the column will show a comma-separated list of IDs.

There is now also an Accumulate On option to accumulate on Execution Market. This will generate one line for each unique combination of symbol and execution market.

Note that other columns with potentially multiple values are now also shown as a comma-separated list of unique values. This includes the columns Broker, Comment, and Client Ref ID.

Net Price column in Portfolio

In the Portfolio page, there is now a new Net Price column available. Net Price is the average price of the position when taking both the invested value and the fee into account: Net Price = (Invested + Fee) / Volume.

Good till Time

Based on trading server configuration, the client now supports Good til Time in the valid field. Selecting it allows the user to type in the time the order should be valid until.

Read Only Access

In some work-flow scenarios there might be users that only need read-only access to the order entry functionality. These users are able to view orders and trades, but are not able to insert, modify or delete orders. This Read-Only access limitation is now supported by the client. This is controlled on a per-user bases on the Trading Server.

Support Parent orders with no children

For order entry providers that support sliced orders (sending in a single parent order and a number of child orders in one go), we have now added support to send in a single parent order with no child orders. This is done by filling in the Total Volume, but not the child order volume, and clearing the Active checkbox. The idea is to add child orders later, by right-clicking the parent order in the Orders list and selecting Add Child order.

Resizable order entry window

The order entry window can now be resized to show more levels in the orderbook.

General Improvements

Improved Portfolio module

The Portfolio module now uses a new file format and improved password and data handling. It is possible to set a target currency for the portfolio, where the exchange rate for market value and totals will be automatically updated.

The Portfolio Charts functionality has been improved and they work more like the other charting windows in the application.

GUI Improvements

The Portfolio, Broker Statistics and Order Entry windows now have improved modern style summary bars.

Save Backup of Workspace File

The logic for saving a workspace has now been changed so that the previous version is renamed to a .~wksp extension.

Quality and Performance improvements

There is a constant increase in the amount of market data available from exchanges, news agencies and other sources. This combined with more advanced functionality and large workspaces means that there is a challenge to keep the client efficient with the usage of resources like memory, CPU time, bandwidth and so on. While we always have efficiency and performance as key factors when designing new features, in this version we have implemented a number of major improvements in this arena.

Detection and prevention of client delays

The client is now able to detect when the data it processes has become delayed in the communication queue. This is an indication that bursts of heavy realtime package peaks and the processing the application and open windows needs to perform on that data has caused packages to accumulate in a waiting queue.

Once a package has been in the queue for more than 0.2 seconds the client is considered to be in "delayed mode". In this mode, some windows reduce parts of their more heavy processing and painting logic to speed up the processing of the queued packages. Once the queue delay comes below 0.1 seconds the client is no longer in "delayed mode" and processing and painting returns to normal.

This delay detection and behavior change lets the client better handle peaks in the realtime traffic.

Visualization of bandwidth usage

The Feeds page of the View | Communication Status window has always shown the current (last second) bandwidth usage for each connected feed and in total. In this version, it is possible to double-click in the BPS column to show a time line chart of the bandwidth usage for up 1800 of the last samples (this corresponds roughly to the last 30 minutes).

Just-in-time loading of market data

Many users have large workspaces with windows spread across a large number of virtual desktop pages. Each window will typically connect to, request and subscribe to data from one or more servers. Until now each window has eagerly downloaded data from the server, even though the window has not become visible yet (because it resides on another desktop page).

In this version, by default, only the windows of the visible desktop page will connect, request and subscribe to data updates. This reduces the bandwidth usage (and thus processing time) noticeably. The first time you enter into a desktop page, the windows in it will connect and request the data they need.

Note that this behavior will have a couple of observable side-effects:

Not all windows support the delayed connection/request/subscribe model. The windows that currently support it are: Market window, Composite window, Orderbook, Broker Statistics, Bar Chart, Symbol window.

This feature can be turned off from Tools | User Interface | General | [ ] Just-in-time loading of market data

Reporting of client performance events

If a client has stayed in the delayed mode stats described above for more than 2 seconds, this is considered and "event" that is logged in the Communication Status log and sent to the Infront Access Server (IAS).

Likewise, if the client sees re-connections (maybe due to hitting bandwidth limits at the client site) this event is logged and reported to the IAS.

When sending these reports, the client includes the following information: Event type, Date, Time, User ID, BPS usage For client delays it includes information about the current and total delay. For re-connects it includes information about provider id, service id, and server host IP.

Optimization of performance

Windows that have shown to use more CPU time that absolutely needed have been optimized to become faster and handle high realtime traffic loads better. This includes windows such as Click Trading, Consolidated Orderbook, Orderbook, Order Status, Option markets, Market Pages, Basket Trading and Portfolio Module. In addition we have made changes to reduce the usage of Windows resources (such as window handles and bitmap handles).