Trading platform development has become an area of fierce competition recently, with many companies concentrating their efforts on ensuring that their proprietary platforms not only keep pace with technological change, but in some cases usurp the ubiquitous third party solutions from all-encompassing giants such as MetaQuotes.
During the latter part of the year, some of the largest firms in the FX industry have become masters of their own technological destiny by offering proprietary platforms in place of MetaTrader 4, with MONEX Group’s recent global initiative in that direction being a prime example.
THis week, Interactive Brokers has demonstrated the importance of platform development with its latest release of its in-house TWS platform version 948.
One such enhancement is the new Portfolio Performance Profile, which Interactive Brokers is dubbing a new what-if feature.
The feature allows traders to toggle the Mosaic Portfolio window into “what-if” mode and add or remove hypothetical positions to and from your existing portfolio to see how these changes will affect key portfolio metrics, including P&L, Delta and the Greeks and Value at Risk. Traders can then save performance results from the hypothetical adding or removing of any positions, and can create and submit real orders to add these positions to actual portfolios.
A new page in the Mosaic Monitor panel has also been added, which is called Scanner-based Predefined Watchlists.
The purpose of this is to allow traders to create a new Watchlist page that is pre-populated using contracts from a user-selected scanner. The list of tickers is automatically refreshed each time a trader logs in. The predefined Watchlist for US Treasuries includes the Mark Yield field.
Changes to the OptionTrader section of the platform include the addition of multiple tabs for the same underlying.
When a trader elects to add a tab to the OptionTrader (Option Chains>Add Tab) to view multiply assets in the same window, previously the ticker had to be different fromthe current ticker; when you tried to add a second occurence of the same ticker, OptionTrader would simply toggle to the already-created tab. With 948, traders can now add multiple tabs for the same ticker. The system will ask whether the trader wants to switch to the existing ticker or create a new tab for the ticker.
As well as a series of enhancements to its charting and indicators, Interactive Brokers ahve also included the ability to configure a “close portion of positions” hotkey which will facilitate closing of part of a position on a pre-selected percentage basis.
For the full release notes from Interactive Brokers, click here.