I recently found an extremely handy little tool: The IB Excel adapter from CyberXpert
This tool makes it easy to get any futures (stock, options, commodities) data from IB into your Excel spreadsheet. I know, you can do that with the IB Excel Spreadsheet as well, but the example is so complex, I had to give up. I only needed streaming quotes, not a whole trading application. This IB Excel Adapter is doing exactly this, with a few lines you can request streaming data for the contracts you are interested in. And the best: The software is free.
I recently became a big believer in round number Support and Resistance lines calculated from Yesterdays close. I traded NG (natural Gas) today. Take a look at the lines labeled -100, -150, -200 and -250. Isn't that neat?
I'm following usually a maximum of 6 contracts a time, when I'm trading. Of these 6 two have multiple timeframes, the other have 5 minute charts. Meaning in hindsight I see a few of these round number hits when I go over the charts after trading. But while trading I miss quite a few setups. Here my new toy comes to play.
I developed this Excel spreadsheet, which you can download here.
(Be aware that you need Excel 2007 to display)
Before you open that spreadsheet, you need to install the IB Excel adapter and you need to run IB TWS, so the spreadsheet can connect to IB.
The Contract details are set on the page named Details and are self explanatory. What you get with the spreadsheet is the Range in Ticks from the Close (Net), the maximum or minimum Range, depending whether we are up or down and the total daily Range in Ticks. The next 2 columns (Bearish/Bullish) show you how strong up or down we are. The numbers are just another representation of the Net column.
I'm sure if you play with it, you will find a lot of other possibilities of what you can do with the IB Excel adapter.
