FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

General Questions

DDEChartUpdater Questions

Q: Is ordering online (the software) safe?

A: Yes. And here is why: Our online store is operated for us by our e-commerce partner ShareIt. Trading-Tools.com uses this prestigious and time-honored company in order to provide you with round the clock ordering services, plus state-of-the-art safety and security when using your credit card online. If you buy your software online, you will receive an email with your license key in less than a minute! ShareIt keeps your credit card info; we do not ever see it. In any case, we do not share, sell or otherwise distribute any of your personal data. We resent companies who do this to us, so we certainly will not do it to you. Top

Q: Do you provide a free trial period?

A: You can enjoy a free 14-day trial of all our programs. All programs are fully functional with the only restriction - they will stop to work when the trial period expires. MLDownloader has one more restriction: You can only download historical quotes back to 1st June 2006. (There is no limit in the full version) Top

Q: Do any of your programs support the new Metastock Data Format that allows more than 255 files per folder?

A: Yes. All programs support the latest MetaStock format and can read/write 6000 securities per folder. Top

Q:Are your programs compatible with Windows 10?

A: Yes. All our programs are compatible with Windows 10 and all other Windows versions that are supported by Microsoft.Top

Q: How can I find out the correct values (DDE item/topic) I need to enter in DDEChartUpdater?

You can use the DDESpy (DDESPY.EXE) tool to monitor dynamic data exchange (DDE) activity in the operating system. You can find this file in the installation folder of DDEChartUpdater. You use the Output menu to select where DDESpy sends output. If you choose the File command, you can specify the name of an output file, or choose the No File button. After you have chosen the File command, DDESpy asks you for an output filename every time you restart it. This prompt can be turned off by reopening the File dialog box and choosing the No File button.

From the Output menu, you can also choose to send your output to either a debug terminal or to the DDESpy window. If you choose a window, you can clear the display window using the Clear Screen command. You can use the Mark command to add marker text to the display for example, before a DDE event to make it easier to find the event in the output file.

It is important to start DDESpy before you start the program creating the DDE items/topics! Use the items/topics that are displayed in the main window of DDESpy and enter the in the "Symbol->Add" dialog. Top

Q: How can I connect to the Bloomberg data feed?

A: DDE links to Bloomberg real-time and snapshot data retrieve values as tab separated strings for specified securities and fields. An example is:
=BLP|M!’IBM Equity,[BID]’
where:
BLP - is the name of the DDE server
M - is the topic of the DDE conversation (monitoring)
The rest of the string is the item of the conversation whose syntax explanation follows.

Syntax
Real-time DDE items have the following syntax:
ticker "," fields [ "(" orientation_flag ")" ]

The Bloomberg real-time DDE item has the following parts:
Part Description
ticker Bloomberg security identifier (ticker).

fields "[" field>{ "," field" } "]" where field is Bloomberg’s Data Dictionary mnemonic identifying some Bloomberg Field. For example:"PX_LAST" or "[BID, ASK]"

< orientation_flag > One of the following: "H""V"where "H" (the default) means that field values will be returned in a tab separated string and "V" means that values will separated by carriage-return/line-feed character pairs.

Notes

  • Elements in <…> brackets are required.
  • Only one of the elements enclosed in (…) and separated by ‘|’ can be present. · Text between square brackets [...] is optional.
  • Text between curly brackets {...} can appear zero, one or more times.
  • Constant strings are delimited by double quote characters and are not case sensitive.
  • Field mnemonics with any form of capitalization are accepted.
  • The ’_’ characters may be replaced with spaces. The casing is not important. For example, instead of typing LAST_TRADE, you could enter "LAST Trade".

Example items
"CT10 Govt, [YLD_SEM_ANN_MID]"
"IBM Equity, [EQY_OPT_CHAIN]"

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