Getting Started Setting Preferences

In the main toolbar, you will see the Setup Prefs button. When you click on this button, you will see a list of Preferences Windows available. This long list is an indicator of the flexibility which Investor/RT provides the user. Investor/RT is installed with reasonable defaults. It is recommended that at some point, you go through each of these windows and explore the options available to you as you begin to utilize the relevant features. At this point, we will visit several of the preference windows that are of importance in getting started with Investor/RT.

• Data Feed Before you can successfully start your data feed, you will need to open the data feed preferences window and ensure that you have correctly entered your data feed login ID and password. Any other settings on this window, such as specifying when data should start and stop, are really up to you. Once you have your have filled in the ID and password (and provided you have already registered Investor//RT), you should be able to start the data feed.
• Historical This preference window allows you to specify how much data you will retain for each symbol (or instrument). You can specify how many days of daily and intraday data, as well as how many years of weekly and monthly data. In addition, in order to keep your database size to a minimum (and therefore minimize the amount of time it takes to backup/restore the database), you can tell Investor/RT to automatically compact tick data into minute bars after a specified number of days. For instance, if you wanted to have all your tick data compacted into one minute bars at the end of every session, you would check the box to "Compact ticks older that 0 days into 1 min. bars."
• Sessions The sessions preferences window allows you to edit existing sessions or create new ones. First, make sure you have the correct time zone specified. Then, make sure that any session of interest to you is defined with the correct times. If you need to edit any existing session, simply select that session from the list and modify the times below. If you would like to create a new session, click the "New" button, and then click the "Rename" button to give the session a descriptive name. Set the correct begin, and end times at the bottom. The "post time" is the time at which Investor/RT will record the official session closing prices for daily bars. It is recommended that this time be 5 to 15 minutes following the close of the session.
• Instruments In Investor/RT, the term Instrument is used interchangeably with Ticker Symbol or Security. An instrument may be a stock, a future, an option, or even a custom instrument. An instrument is anything on which Investor/RT collects and stores data. The Instrument Preferences window allows you to specify the characteristics that any newly added ticker symbol will inherit. For security type, you should specify the type of security which you most often watch. For display format, you should specify the format in which you would most often like to see your price data display: 1/16ths, 99.99 (two decimal places), etc... For the default exchange, it is highly recommended that this be left as COMP or composite. This means that Investor/RT will accept any quote on this symbol that comes in through the data feed, and will require that the quote came in with a specific exchange tagged to it. For default session, specify the most common session of instruments you track. In the data retention section, specify the timeframes of data which you would like Investor/RT to retain for most of your symbols. It is generally recommended that you leave Daily checked, with Weekly and Monthly unchecked. If want to maintain Intraday data for new symbols you add to Investor/RT, it is recommended that you check Intraday. All these default settings can be overridden after you add instruments to the system. These are just the settings that each new symbol will inherit initially.