I am in the process of testing out Wealth Lab and want to primarily use the product for futures trading, but am trying to determine the best data provider to use. I have been looking through the forums and wiki and cannot quite determine whether Wealth Lab accepts data from CSI, which is supposed to be one of the cleanest data providers out there. I am quite new to all of this so I apologize if I should have been able to figure this out already.

Thanks

Unfair Advantage's COM-based API is not supported. However, according to their Format Specifications page, CSI data can be either offered CSV and Metastock or exported to these formats. Both CSV and MS can be easily imported into Wealth-Lab with the help of built-in ASCII and Metastock providers.

Re: use the product for futures trading. Please note that Wealth-Lab Pro is available to Fidelity customers who trade stocks/ETFs over 36 times in a rolling 12-month period, with a minimum of $25,000 in assets (source: Fidelity website). Wealth-Lab Developer can not be purchased by U.S. residents.

Hi, are there any plans to support CSI's COM-Based API?

Hi, there are no plans to support any COM-based APIs in principle.

Hello,

I have a related question - is it possible to somehow update the data produced by Unfair Advantage daily and generate alerts for those in the strategy monitor ?

How would I go about it in general ? I currently have Unfair Advantage trial installed and it produces the files in either ASCII or MetaStock format... how can I feed this data into Wealth Lab so that the strategy takes it into account ? I set up a database, but apparently the database provider doesn't support paper trading... I don't have any option to update a ASCII or MS dataset manually once created either... so I'm out of ideas.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi Kamil,

QUOTE:
I set up a database, but apparently the database provider doesn't support paper trading

I do not see any connection that a database might have to ASCII or MS data. (Well, the Database provider can be used to read ASCII data or Excel or even HTML tables by virtue of ODBC but all that is bit of overkill). Let's put it the other way round: Wealth-Lab supports paper trading through the Database provider. It's just streaming updates in the Accounts window the DB provider isn't compatible with but this is not critical. If you wish to raise this particular question please find a dedicated thread, thank you.

QUOTE:
is it possible to somehow update the data produced by Unfair Advantage daily and generate alerts for those in the strategy monitor ?

By design, neither MS nor ASCII data is fully compatible with SM as these formats naturally lack the ability to request data on demand from a remote source. To work with the Strategy Monitor, a data provider must support "data update on demand" feature which is not the case for ASCII and MS.

However, if you update your ASCII or MS folder every day before the Next Run arrives, say by exporting from UA manually or using an external scripting tool like AutoIT for that, the SM should pick up the updated file. Or is your experience different?

Note: you may still encounter issues (like THIS) when trying to make ASCII/MS work in the SM - as we repeatedly cautioned in an email conversation. Might be a better idea to use IQFeed which is fully supported for the SM.

Hey Eugene,

Thank you very much for your reply.

I will try updating the files and see if they're picked up properly.

The reason why I'm not very happy about using IQFeed is that the price is much higher than for CSI Data and I only need EOD anyway... so paying over $500/month for futures data doesn't really make much sense to me at this point, especially that for about $800 I can get the same data from CSI for the whole year :)

It the file update route doesn't work - is it possible to write a custom data provider with the "data update on demand" functionality ? I'm a software developer, so I could try doing this, but I'm new to using WL and I just wonder if there won't be any WL limitations I will encounter ? I asked about ASCII or MS because I envisioned that such a provider could look at those files and just reload the data contained in them or pick up what's new and only send that to WL. There are some problems with that though (like figuring out what's new) and using a database could solve at least some of those... Loading files produced by UA into the database is easy... so I was thinking of using it as an intermediary...

If it is possible, could you please direct me towards some source code that gives an example of what pieces have to be present for WL to consider a provider having the "update on demand" support ?

Best,
Kamil

Since this discussion is going to deviate considerably from general usage of CSI data, let me suggest that you create a dedicated forum thread. Thanks.

Eugene,

I'd like to clarify

QUOTE:
By design, neither MS nor ASCII data is fully compatible with SM as these formats naturally lack the ability to request data on demand from a remote source. To work with the Strategy Monitor, a data provider must support "data update on demand" feature which is not the case for ASCII and MS.

Is the only problem that DataManager can't update an ASCII or MS DataSet (ie, if On Demand Data Update is checked, bad things will happen), or is there some other problem with using ASCII or MS data in Strategy Monitor or an individual Strategy?

If it is the first problem, unchecking On Demand Data Update and

QUOTE:
if you update your ASCII or MS folder every day before the Next Run arrives

, there shouldn't be a problem with using CSI data in either ASCII or MS format.

If it is the latter, is there any reason I couldn't write a simple Strategy to save the ASCII or MS format data as Yahoo data or some other data provider that is supported?

Kamil,

I'm currently on a quest for better data also. What are you relying on that CSI

QUOTE:
is supposed to be one of the cleanest data providers out there

?