You must assign an exchange in addition to the 'default' exchange?

[overflowing]

I use esignal data feed and I connect to yahoo to get dividend updates. When I go to the instrument manager to update dividends & splits, after updating when I hit OK button sometimes I will get the following message:

"You must assign an exchange in addition to the 'default' exchange"

I can go to the definitions tab and select an exchange such as Nyse or Nasdaq and then click OK and all will be well.

1. What purpose does setting the exchange serve?
2. Is there any way to avoid this step? It's quite annoying

[NinjaTrader_PatrickH]

Hello overflowing,

Thank you for your post.

Setting the exchange assigns the exchange to request the instrument for from the data feed provider. Some data feed providers need not only the instruments name but the exchange as well when NinjaTrader requests the data. There is no method to avoid this step, when updating dividends and splits form Yahoo it needs to know what exchange the symbol/instrument is on. Instrument/symbol/tick symbols can be used on multiple exchanges for the same company or different companies.

Please let me know if I may be of further assistance.

[overflowing]

For my setup using esignal/yahoo data what would be the consequence of choosing an arbitrary exchange such as "Ace" for a nasdaq symbol such as HIMX?

Clearly esignal and yahoo work without the exchange specified since I can pull up a chart and pull the latest dividend info all without any exchange other than 'Default' specified. Basically I don't want to waste my time double checking which exchange a stock is on and then scrolling down and choosing the correct one if practically it has no impact on anything I do.