New Order Window

Description

The New Order Window is the main window for entering, changing or amending orders and includes fields for entering price, volume, portfolio and other conditions.

How to access

The window can be accessed by:

Consolidate New Order window

The new order window supports consolidation, which allows you to view available markets consolidated by right clicking or using the shortcut Ctrl+G. When these windows are in consolidated mode a Σ will appear before the Bid and Ask size columns

Order

Click the BUY! or SELL! button to perform the buy or sell operation. Normally the default button is marked in blue (buy) or red (sell). Press Enter to perform the default action.

If you double click on the Bid or Ask column in the Orderbook, the price and volume are automatically inserted in to the New Order Window.

Tick sizes

The arrows in the New Order window under Price and Volume are for changing the sizes. The tick sizes are automatically retrieved from the trading system.

Note: If the tick size is wrong please contact the trading system administrator.

Portfolio

Each order must be linked to a portfolio. Enter a name in the "Portfolio" field or click in the text field and use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to browse through the list of portfolios in the portfolio text field. Depending on the access rights of your login, browsing will be done among a fixed list of portfolios or among the ones that have been entered by.

Active vs inactive orders

An Active order is sent to the marketplace directly. An Inactive order is only sent to the trading system, not to the market place. An inactive order can be changed to active in the Orders tab in the Trading Window when you right-click on the order.

The top of the window shows details about the symbol you’re about to enter an order against, including ticker code, volume, last, change and % change and an order book.

The normal fields include order volume, price, value and portfolio. Enter the volume and price you want to trade at. The value field is automatically updated. If enabled (see Settings) you can even enter a value, and the volume field is adjusted accordingly.

If you have only access to a single portfolio, the portfolio field is disabled. Otherwise you may have access to a list of portfolios. Internal users will be able to enter the name of any portfolio. Internal users also have access to an additional field called Client RefID.

Order Confirmation

Before an order is sent to the exchange, you are asked to confirm the order. This function can be turned off by clicking the checkbox "Do not show this message again". This function can be re-activated in Settings.

Advanced fields

Press the Adv. (short for Advanced) button to show additional fields, these include:

Open Volume

The volume you want to expose to the public order book, must be less or equal to Volume.

Valid

Valid until date - set if the order should be kept in the market for longer than today. Some trading providers does not allow setting a valid until date.

Trad.power

Short for Trading Power. This shows your current trading power in the given portfolio. For some trading providers the displayed trading power will be relative to the instrument you are about to create an order on.

Type

Short for order type. Possible values are defined under Order Types

Comment

The comment field allows you to associate arbitrary text with your order. The comment can be displayed as a column in the Orders tab in the Trading window. Support for comment fields are subject to trading provider restrictions.

Conditional Orders/Monitor Orders

The program supports entering conditional orders. These are orders that will not be activated to the market until one or more conditions are met. Press the Condition button to display the Edit order conditions dialog.

Support for conditional orders are subjected to trading providers and market feed restrictions.

You can enter one or more conditions to be met before your order is activated in the market place. The available condition fields and operators may vary, but typically includes fields such as Last, Bid, Ask, Bid Size, Ask Size, Last Volume and Time and operators such as Less than or Equal and Larger than or Equal. In the value column you enter the value or time you want to test against.

If you enter more than one condition, all conditions must be fulfilled (And) or any one the conditions must be fulfilled (Or). Support for conditional orders is subject to the trading system and market regulations.

Support for conditional orders are subject to trading provider and market feed restrictions.

Client/Asset Manager/Broker

In some markets and environments, there is a need to have a more detailed hierarchy of order ownership and routing that the two level login/portfolio model that has been supported until now. If the trading server is configured for it, the client will now display a list of clients, asset managers and brokers in addition to the list of portfolios when entering a new order. The list of available clients is determined by the permissions of the trading login. The selected client name determines the list of available asset managers and portfolios. The selected client and portfolio determines the list of available brokers.

To support this feature there are now also new Client, Asset Manager and Broker columns that can be added to the Orders and Trades lists in the Trading window and to the Basket Trading window. The Edit Basket Trading Order window has also been extended to support these new fields.

Slice Orders

Slice orders are used to send a number of orders on the same symbol as a logical entity. There is a parent order with a total volume and child orders with sub volumes, adding up to the total volume. So the parent order is sliced up into child orders. Each child order can have different details like volume, price limits, order type, target broker an so on.

In the New Order window, click the bottom [+] icon or the Split Order label to create a new child order (total volume needs to be set first).

You can remove a child order by clicking the red [X] button at the right side. Each child order can be expanded to see the more advanced fields by clicking the blue [+] icon in front of it.

By default the sum volume of the child orders must match the total volume of the parent order. In some cases, the user would like to enter a parent order with a larger total volume than in the child orders. To enable this mode, check the [X] Allow partial parent orders setting in the Tools | Trading settings dialog

Parent/Child orders

The Trading window shows the list of active (and configurable executed and deleted) orders. The Orders page can now be configured to show Parent orders the Child order belonging to them grouped together in the grid. To do this, select Parent Child from the Layout drop down.

Add Child Order

If you have a parent order with a total volume that is larger than the sum of the volume in the active child orders, you can now add additional child orders to it. Right click the parent order and select Add Child Order.

This will open an Add Child Order window where you can enter the details of a new child order. The child order volume may not exceed the remaining total volume of the parent order.

The new child order will appear belonging to the initial parent order.

Quick order entry

The 5.7 version introduces a tighter and more space compact alternative to the standard order entry window.

The setting is enabled in the Visual preferences in the Orderbook Setup by unchecking the Show orderbook box.

Once this setting has been done the feature can be toggled on/off by pressing F9.

Request Quote

Request orders are normally used in non-volatile markets, when the user wants to request a bid and/or ask quote. When selected, the New Order dialog changes to only enable the Volume field, changes the buttons to Both, Bid and Ask.

A Quote Request order are used only in some markets. You can file a request for a price quote from a bank/broker on an instrument and a certain volume, and you get a response with a price and a limited time to accept or reject the offer.

The Request Quote page is available in the New Order window when the market is configured to support it. This is subject to configuration at your trading provider. You can enter a volume and then press the Bid button to get a bid quote (if you want to sell), the Ask button to get an ask quote (if you want to buy), or the Both button to get both a bid and an ask quote.

Depending on your provider, you may get a time limited quote back. Then a Quote Offer window pops up, showing you the Symbol, Portfolio and Volume that you entered. Below there are fields with the ask and/or bid offer in price and total value (price multiplied by volume). Next to each quote offer is a Buy and Sell button. Press one of these before the timer runs out if you want to accept the offer. Press Cancel (or wait for the timer to expire) to reject the offer. At the bottom of the Quote Offer window is a timer displayed as a declining progress bar - when the bar reaches zero, time has run out and the offer is automatically withdrawn.

Strategy orders

See Algo Trading.

Keyboard Short-cuts

In the New Order window, you can now enter a ’k’ or ’m’ suffix in the volume fields to have them multiplied by one thousand or one million, respectively. This can be useful when entering large volumes.

In the Tools | Preferences | Trading settings dialog, the default volume field has been changed from a nominal volume to a multiples of boardlot value. This makes much more sense as using a fixed default volume will make the default order value fluctuate for differently priced symbols.

The client now supports getting variable tick sizes per instrument from the trading server. When configured correctly on the server, this will give more correct steps in the price when using the up and down arrows in the price field.

We now support using fractional volumes - entering decimals on the volume field is accepted. This is needed for some forex and commodity markets, for instance.

The View Order dialog will now also list custom fields that are defined dynamically on the trading server. The displayed fields will vary with the trading provider and the market place.

We now support opening more than one Trading window for the same trading provider (but each window will use the same login). The dialog that pops up to confirm that you want to Deactivate all orders has now been made optional.

Whenever you insert an order, an order is refused or a trade executed the client will now play an audio sound. The sounds can be configured or turned off using the new Alerts page of the Tools | Trading settings dialog. We have also moved some other alerts related dialog settings into the same page (changed in 3.8.1).

Some markets (such as Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen Stocks) have different tick size (minimum price change) rules for different category of symbols. The client now supports these additional tick size tables (new in version 3.8.1)

Log of information

All actions performed in the trading windows (such as order inserted, trade executed etc), are logged in the Log page of the Trading window. Now this log is also persisted to .log files in the Ontrade\Setup directory. The files are named OrderEntry"nr"_date.log where "nr" is the provider id of the trading provider and "date" is the date of the performed actions.

Filtering and groups has now been extended to support all columns in the four Trading pages (Orders, Trades, Accumulated Trades and Portfolio)