For many years, Investor/RT has supported the Trading Notes indicator as a means of viewing entry and exit points of trading activity. When fills occur, Investor/RT automatically adds a trading note to the database for the instrument/symbol. The Trading Notes indicator when present in a chart of that symbol, fetches the trading notes and draws notations at each price/time where a buy or sell occurred. Trading notes are collected in the database when using the built-in trading simulator or when using a brokerage trading account. Over time, trading notes can accumlate in the database, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of them. Older trading notes are not purged. You can use the Trading Notes window (accessible from the chart toolbar, the quotepage toolbar, or the instrument setup window) to delete all trading notes on the database for a specific symbol to start with a clean slate. The reason that the build-up of trading notes is problematic is that whenever a fill occurs and a new trading note is added, the Trading Note indicator in any open chart must access the database again to refresh the list of notes and the time it takes to do this can be noticable when there are many thousands of notes on file for the symbol involved.
More recently, the TradeViewer RTX extension was introduced to improve the chart visualization of prior and ongoing trading. Importantly, TradeViewer is far more efficient because it makes no use of trading notes. When a chart opens with TradeViewer, say a chart depicting the last five trading days, Investor/RT accesses the database to fetch the trading account position history for only the most recent five trading days. As new fills occur for the symbol, these are updated internally instead of accessing the database to load possibly thousands of older trading notes.
If you use the trading simulator to practice trade or trade a brokerage related trading account and you wish to visualize your trading activity in your charts, TradeViewer is now the recommended method. There are a number of settings that will need adjustment to eliminate the inefficiencies of using the Trading Notes indicator:
- First use the File menu to view the general trading preferences - File > Preferences > Trading > Trading General
- Uncheck the box titled Show Trading Notes Buy Sell Markers.
- Check the box titled Show TradeViewer if you wish TradeViewer to be automatically added to your charts of any symbols you trade.
- Existing charts that contain traded symbols may have Trading Notes Indicator present in them. Use the Chart Element Manager to check and delete this indicator from the chart. Chart Element Manager can be viewed by double-clicking inside the chart window or by right-clicking and choosing Setup > Elements.
- Optionally, you can turn off automatic creation of trading notes as fills occur by setting a configuration variable. Use File > Preferences > Configuration (Ctrl+Y shortcut), select OnFillAddTradingNotes and set to false. Click OK to save the setting.
- Optionally, you can delete all trading notes for all symbols using the Database Wizard. Use File > Data > Database Wizard (Alt+U shortcut). In the section titled Database Initialization, select Trading Notes from the menu titled Other and click the Delete button to the right of that menu.