TD Ameritrade & Chart Trader

[NJA_MC]

I tried to place a SELL Stop Limit and/or Stop market below market price on chart trader on UWTI as I am currently flat and what to go short.

I get a "Your order(s) can't be placed. The total quantity of outstanding open sell orders(s) exceeds the quantity you hold...." error.

This is because the chart trader is trying to enter a SELL rather than a SELL SHORT which I can place with no problem through TDA's website. Same thing happened on the Dynamic SuperDOM. (Only when selecting my TDA account, everything works fine in SIM101).

I can place the "Short" order from the Order Ticket, but get the same results as the DOM & CHART TRADER if I try to use the "SELL" option on the Order ticket.

Seems like DOM & Chart Trader don't recognize they are going short and simply use a SELL rather than SELL SHORT. Chart Trader & DOM show flat prior to trying the order entry.

[NinjaTrader_ChristopherJ]

Hello,

I will need to look into this further Monday morning and will follow up as soon as I gather additional information.

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Thanks for posting, can you please take a look at the basic entry window.

Here we toggle the sellshort/cover logic based on position, you'll even see the button text change as you change positions.

When we worked on basic entry I recall that it wasn't a 100% solution in all scenarios but don't recall the details at the moment.

What I'm after is feedback around if toggling order action based on position is sufficient or to meet the needs of traders on TDA we really need to add additional buttons to the chart trader to allow exact order action to be specified manually. This requires a lot more buttons be added that clutter up the UI.

Note: TDA is the only adapter that requires explicit order action to be defined, all other broker/connection technologies smartly toggle on the server. As such we likely would not add the logic to DOM but I still needed to review for chart trader.

[NJA_MC]

Thanks for posting, can you please take a look at the basic entry window.

Here we toggle the sellshort/cover logic based on position, you'll even see the button text change as you change positions.

When we worked on basic entry I recall that it wasn't a 100% solution in all scenarios but don't recall the details at the moment.

What I'm after is feedback around if toggling order action based on position is sufficient or to meet the needs of traders on TDA we really need to add additional buttons to the chart trader to allow exact order action to be specified manually. This requires a lot more buttons be added that clutter up the UI.

Note: TDA is the only adapter that requires explicit order action to be defined, all other broker/connection technologies smartly toggle on the server. As such we likely would not add the logic to DOM but I still needed to review for chart trader.

Sorry for the delay getting back to you, I am hoping other TDA users express their thoughts as well.

I guess, I am having trouble understanding the issue. If you understand the position, you should be able to determine the action. So with the same buttons offered today maybe the "Connection" needs to translate the order.

In other words. TDA doesn't not allow multiple positions. So for example, if I have 1000 GE LONG and I try to sell 1500 SHORT, I will get an error from TDA's website. If the true intend to to be 500 SHORT, then the 1500 short would be translated into:
Sell 1000
SellToOpen 500 (Short)

If I am FLAT and I see 1500 GE, then I am simply going to SellToOpen (I think this is what they call it) 1500 shares (SellShort).

I am not sure if this logic can be implemented in the connection but for example the chart trader should only allow you to sell what you have long and buy what you have short.

I am not sure I answered your question, as I think I sidestepped your question and offered a different solution given the current UI.

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Thanks for posting. No your right and this is the solution that we had for NT7. However it didn't work in all scenarios and got numerous support tickets on when it failed to work properly in all scenarios. Which is why we changed it to explicit order action being required in NT8.

Which I needed to look into implementing for chart trader.

[NJA_MC]

Hummm.... Strange... I didn't use TDA connection on NT7 due to the 32 bit requirement...

[dalebru]

I'm a TDA user but very low volume. FWIW I really like your current APPROACH to toggle sell/sell short based on position. But I haven't had time to actually work with it.

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Thanks for the feedback, We implemented that approach for Chart Trader and will be coming for beta 3.