Instrument management overview

Introduction

This support page introduces the important Investor/RT concepts to be aware of when managing instruments (especially during the rollover procedure) and possibly customising some individual settings (Instrument data Monitoring & Retention, Day Session hours, etc.).

To check the setup of a symbol, access the corresponding instrument settings window through one of the following ways:

• Press Alt-A to open the Instrument Setup window (and type the Symbol) OR
• From any Chart: right click anywhere and select the menu Setup > Instrument  OR
• From any Quotepage: right click “ticker” column on the cell with the symbol and select the menu Setup > Instrument

Typical instrument setup with a broker feed (Rithmic, CQG or IBKR) and with a DTN MA subscription

Let's review what a default instrument settings window looks like under a Rithmic datafeed configuration. The following screenshot reflects the settings for the E-Mini S&P 500 contract expiring in September 2025 for an IR/T user located in the Eastern Time Zone.

The instrument setting window banner displays the current data feed that has been configured, along with the timezone (see the specific discussion about the timezone in the Sessions section below)

The brokerage symbol to be used (as in the example above) should always be an individual contract symbol, such as ESU5 (and not any continuous contract symbol that Rithmic / CQG or IBKR may have set up), even if a DTN MA subscription will effectively "transform" ESU5 into a continuous contract symbol...

Indeed, in the bottom left corner, for DTN MA subscribers, the "Downloading Alias" corresponds to the DTN symbol that will be used for any data backfill requests sent to the DTN historical data servers (such downloading requests will be internally managed by I/RT 99% of the time).

If you use the default settings of I/RT, the default DTN downloading alias (for any ES quarterly contracts) will be @ES#, ie S&P 500 E-mini continuous contract, back-adjusted for rollover premium.

Whenever you will using ESU5 on any chart, this will in fact correspodn to the ES continuous contract at that date: ie, the quotes for the front-month period will correspond to the September 2025 contract, but any quotes prior to the June to September rollover date will correspond to the continuous contract, not to what the ESU5 contract might have traded before it became the front month contract. Please review the Continuous Contract support page if you are not familiar with this concept (and to learn when you might need to modify this setting).

Typical instrument setup with IQ feed as a live data source 

This screenshot displays the same symbol settings (ie the E-Mini S&P 500 contract expiring in September 2025), but for a user with an IQ feed live data subscription and executing orders to a Rithmic account.

With an IQ feed subscription, one should notice the following differences in this setup window : 

• It does not include any Downloading Alias, as the main DTN symbol is always used as a reference for both live data streaming and for any historical data backfills.
• On the bottom right corner, it includes a "Broker Symbol" input box. Indeed, during the configuration phase, if an IQ feed user has opted to execute orders through one of the supported order execution systems (Rithmic, CQG, Interactive Brokers), the corresponding Broker symbol must be manually entered in this setup window (or by modifying directly the content of the "Broker Symbol" column on any QuotePage). The selected brokerage destination will always show up in the window title banner.

Note: If you use @ESU25 as DTN symbol on a chart, you will get effectively all quotes corresponding to that contract (with, in fact, very low volumes prior to June 2025). The vast majority of IQ feed user will directly use the @ES# continuous contract symbol as the primary instrument through all your charts and quotepages. This way, at the DTN rollover date (ie, whenever the continuous contract starts reflecting the new front month contract), other than doing a full data download, you only have to update the broker symbol according to their broker nomenclature.

While there is no reason to change some of the fundamental future contract specifications (format, currency, exchange, expiration date, etc), we discuss below the other instrument settings, that may be of interest when running Investor/RT on a daily basis, ie the full and day sessions hours settings, the intraday monitoring status and the historical data retention settings.

Full and day Session settings

Here are the key things to know about sessions in Investor/RT:

• I/RT comes with a list of predefined sessions that can be managed in the "Session preferences" menu
• For a given market, the full session hours dictate the period of the day for which Investor/RT will collect quotes from the data source: it should therefore typically match the market opening hours. (Typically, for most of the US futures, this corresponds to the whole Globex session, running from 6 pm to 5 pm ET)
• Throughout the year, I/RT has developed a full toolkit of unique indicators (Session statistics, Session Prices, Mixed Periodicity Data, etc) designed to generate key market levels and statistics that do rely on the defintion of a "day session", typically reflecting the cash market session hours for Equity indexes futures, or former pit trading hours for commodity (Oil, Gold, agri products) or financial futures  (Bonds, etc)
• Within the Session preferences window, a given Full Session # can be associated with a (single) Day session. This is how a Day Session is defined for a given instrument.

You will find additional information in the Sessions 101 support page, including the full and day session hours being used by default for every pre-defined future contract in Investor/RT. If you are a new user and have recently performed a fresh install, ie using the "Starter database" shipped with 16.1 beta 10 (or a later release), then you are ready to go..

Important note for existing I/RT subscribers: you may have set up an instrument using another session # in the past. What is essential is not the session numbers themselves, but that you use a set of relevant full & day sessions for a given symbol, ie a full session that does match the market opening session hours (for making sure you collect all the transactions and a day session that fits your specific market analysis needs.)

The instrument's "intraday monitoring" status

Each instrument has an on/off "intraday monitoring" status. When a symbol is marked for intraday monitoring, it has 2 main consequences :

1. When you start Investor/RT with the default setup (ie both configuration variables AutoConnectToData and BackfillAutomation set to true), IRT will download all missing data that may have been traded on the market (since the last time I/RT was running), corresponding to the list of instruments being monitored intraday (independently from any chart or Quotepage including that symbol being open).
2. Once you are connected to your datafeed (either IQ Feed or a brokerage data feed such as Rithmic) during your trading session, Investor/RT will always monitor that symbol tick by tick, i.e. collect and retain the corresponding tick data, even if you have currently no chart open (displaying that symbol) or a Quotepage open that rerquire the monitoring of that symbol.

Consequences: If you open a new chart or switch your existing chart to a monitored instrument, it will immediately update, as there is no need to perform any kind of download. If you open a new chart for an instrument not tagged for intraday, the initial backfill/data download will take place when you open the chart (not when you started your data feed).

To summarize: for your regularly traded markets, make sure the corresponding symbols are tagged intraday (this is most likely the case as this is the default settings), for the other ones that you may have opened once, or that you don’t need to monitor, they can be untagged, as easing the load on your computer CPU and RAM is always welcome: no need to maintain a live monitoring of millions of ticks you have no use for!

Please check the Instrument Monitoring Status support page to know how to easily identify the symbols being monitored and about the different methods to turn on/off intraday monitoring

The historical data retention settings

Here are the different ways to access the data retention settings for tick data, intraday data (1 min bar) and Daily data:

• Press Ctrl+H to open the Instrument Setup window (and type the Symbol) OR
• From any chart: right click anywhere and select the menu Setup > Historical Data retention  OR
• From any Quotepage: just add the "Retain TickData", "Retain Intra" and "Retain Daily" columns (by right clicking on any column title and selecting "Add Column")

Data retention settings determine how long the software stores historical tick, one-minute, and daily bar data for tracked symbols. Users can adjust these settings globally or on a per-symbol basis. This allows for flexible management of disk space and data availability. The default settings (from I/RT 16 onwards) are 5 days for tick data, 1000 days for 1 min data and 3000 days for daily data.

With the current 64-bit infrastructure, there are no more limitations on the size of the quote database within Investor/RT. Still, the (global) tick data retention setting is voluntarily set by default to a low number (ie 5 days) as it is highly recommended to increase it on a case by case basis (and not on a global way that would apply to any instrument). If you need a chart with a 3-month lookback period and a non time based periodicity (such as renko or range bars) that requires tick-by-tick data, then the Retain tickdata settings should be increased accordingly. Whenever you adjust such retention settings, a full data download operation needs to be performed

The Downloading and Retaining data support page provides more more details about data retention settings and to understand the difference between a full data download and other custom download operations, knowing that, on a day-to-day basis, all necessary data backfill operations needed to keep your charts or quotepages updated will be performed by I/RT automatically without any user intervention.