Changing Playback Symbol(s)
Investor/RT playback is designed to allow market data replay of one or more ticker symbols for periods of time in the past. Use Data > Playback (Alt+8) to open the Playback window and specify the ticker symbol you wish to playback. If you want to play back tick data for multiple symbols, specify instead the name of the quote page containing those symbols. Playing back multiple symbols allows you to have charts open that use market data for more than one symbol or multiple charts open with different symbols. When playback is active, all open charts that contain the symbol or symbols being played back will update. If you have playback active and notice that some charts are not updating, check the playback setup to see if the symbols in those charts are included in the playback quote page. To make corrections like this or to change the one symbol to playback, close the playback window and open a new one.
While playback is running you can make adjustments to your chart preferences, add or remove indicators or open new chart windows. Anything you do during playback will be in the context of the playback time perspective: new charts will open to the playback time, new indicators will calculate to the time shown in the playback window.
Pausing Playback
Investor/RT playback is designed to allow you to pause playback temporarily. While paused, there is no restriction on what you can do but any actions will be performed based on the actual time of day. You can take screen shot or copy Investor/RT chart images to the clipboard, save chart pictures, open new chart windows, download some historical data, or change the chart periodicity or any other property. You can even start the data feed and look at real-time charts for a while, then stop the live market data and resume playback again.
Resuming Playback
When you resume playback, Investor/RT will reload (synchronize) all open windows to the playback time of day and resume playback. If you have an extensive layout of charts or you have particular charts open having long viewing periods (e.g. years back of intra-day data), then naturally this may take a few seconds for the chart(s) to be reloaded; then playback resumes.
Instant Resume
In some cases, you may be playing back a single chart and want to pause playback only briefly and then quickly resume without bothering to reload the chart. Investor/RT 12.6 adds an instant resume playback feature for this purpose. To instant resume, hold down the SHIFT key (or Ctrl key) as you click the Play button in the Playback window. An ordinary click on the Play button reloads the charts and resumes; shift-clicking the Play button resumes playback immediately, skipping the reload. When resuming playback, messages will appear in the main toolbar status message area. When a normal resume is done, the message reads Resuming Playback... Shift-click Play for instant resume. If resuming playback takes more than a second or two, and you have not made adjustments to your charts or opened new ones while paused, use the instant resume feature instead for faster resuming. If you are making a video during playback, this ability to instantly pause and resume the playback will especially useful.