|
Answer |
Lets say your are trading ESH6 and you want to rollover
to the June(M),
Open any quotepage that contains ESH6, e.g. the ".Futures" quotepage.
Click once on the ticker symbol ESH6 to edit the ticker cell. Change the
H to a M. The symbol should now read ESM6.
Press the enter key to complete your edit of the ticker. IRT will ask
you if you wish to Add ESM6 as a new instrument, or modify ESH6 to
ESM6. It is suggested that you just “Modify”. This way, all of the historical data formerly
kept under ESH6 will then belong to the ESM6. ESH6 will no longer exist
as symbol in IRT.
IB Users Only:
Make sure that the quotepage shows the columns
“Name” and “Expiration Date”. If not, right-click on any column title
and choose “Add a Column”. You also need to edit the Name and
Expiration Date cells in the quotepage. The name is just descriptive
text for the symbol, won’t hurt anything if you don’t change it, but if
the name contains “Sept” just for documentation sake you should edit it
to read Dec. The important thing is the expiration date since IB uses
the date to know which contract you want. Edit the 03 month to 06 for
the June contract.IB with DTN Market
Access Users Only:
Make sure that the quotepage shows the column
“Alias Ticker”. If not, right-click on any column title
and choose “Add a Column”. This Alias Ticker is the ticker symbol
that I/RT uses to when downloading data from DTNMA. You'll also
need to adjust this to reflect the correct DTNMA ticker symbol. If
you need help with DTNMA symbols, see the
Symbols page.
It is recommended that you make your rollover symbol adjustments between
trading sessions with the data feed connection off (working offline).
Then start the feed and you will begin receiving data for the revised
symbol(s). If you perform rollover(s) while the data feed is active,
afterwards it is necessary to stop, then start the data feed so that all
charts and quotepages will begin receiving data on the new contract
expiration. This can be done quickly by clicking on the Start Data
button on the main toolbar.
Note that ticker symbols are stored with chart setups. When you open a
chart that was formerly associated with ESH6, I/RT will find that ESH6 no
longer exists and it will just substitute some other symbol from those
you are following. When this happens, simply type ESM6 and press enter
to switch the chart to ESM6.
Downloading historical data for the new contract for the period
BEFORE the rollover data is not recommended since the thin trading of
the new contract in the past will replace the former contract's trading.
After rollover, if you need to download historical data, make sure the
download begins on the rollover date, not earlier. This can be
done in the data download window or by downloading from a chart that
displays only the current session for example.
New in 8.3.0
Futures Rollover Automation
Improvements were made to more fully automate the process of rolling
a futures contract ticker symbol to a new contract month. To illustrate,
consider an IB user tracking the March S&P E-mini contract, ticker
symbol ESH6. The user also employs DTN Market Access for backfill. ESH6
is setup with @ESH6 as the "downloading alias" symbol. To rollover ESH6
to the June contact, the user opens a quotepage, e.g. the .Futures page,
and edits the ticker symbol ESH6, changing ESH6 and ESM6. Press tab or
enter key to complete the edit. IRT will then prompt whether to create a
new instrument ESM6 or modify the existing instrument. We recommend
"Modify" since all of the historical data for ESH6 will then be
available under the new symbol ESM6. If the user chooses "Modify", IRT
will prompt for the new downloading alias ticker and broker alias ticker
if appropriate, and then prompt for the new expiration date. The current
expiration will be shown, e.g. 03/09/06 (mm/dd/yy), so in this example,
change 03 to 06. The day of the month in June is not critical. If you
know it edit the day also. Finally, IRT will ask if you would like to
update all charts containing the former symbol (ESH6). If you choose
"Yes", IRT closes all chart windows, scans the database for any charts
that contain ESH6 and updates each chart setup to reference ESM6
instead. This process targets all traditional charts and special chart
types: TPO Price/Time Profile, Volume Profile, Point & Figure, etc.
Traditional charts, unlike the specialty charts, can have multiple
instruments with some indicators associated with one instrument and
other indicators associated with another. IRT handles these more complex
chart setups, updating the ESH6 instrument to ESM6 and updating all
associated indicators for ESH6 to use ESM6, while leaving other
instruments and their indicators as they were.
Rollover automation will greatly improve the user experience when
moving to a new futures contract month. After rollover is complete, open
your charts or your layout and your charts will contain the same data as
before (e.g. the data formerly associated with ESH6) yet the chart will
now track ESM6 real-time and download ESM6 data upon request.
One cautionary note: after rollover, it is important that you avoid
downloading historical data into the chart for the period prior to the
rollover date. It is advisable that you turn off automatic downloading
(Setup: Preferences: Charts: General) unless all of your charts are for
the current session only. If you have a last ten day intraday chart
open, for example, and downloaded data, any data for the period before
the rollover would replace the former symbol's data. For this reason we
recommend using the data download window to request historical data
since there you may specify the exact beginning date of the download and
in general better control the downloading period. Another technique is
to use the File: Export command to export say 1 minute bars for the
contract immediately after performing the rollover. This exported data
will then be available in a text file and may be easily imported using
File: Import: Data if necessary. |