My E- signal allows you to view expired contracts for the purpose of conducting back studys, and doing historical research.
Although I have my brokers charting system for actual trades, which is live streaming, I maintain a subscription to e-signals cheapie data on demand platform because it is vastly superior for doing my morning market search...well, according to me anyway, because it's what I am used to.
It has 2 ways to enter a chart code. The first is by the month manually. In this case I would enter in the chart code SBH12 and that gives me Sugar, #11, contact month is March 2012
The second allows you to build folders of charts that are constantly moving forward in time. The code right now for Sugar, march 2012 would be SB 1!
That code gives me whatever the front month in sugar would be. SB 2! would be the second month, and so on.
This allowed me to build permanent template pages for grains, meats, softs, metals and energies (I don't mess with indexes or currencies, however I have some of those templates set up as well) that update to the most current front month, and second month automatically, so I don't have to re code a million charts each month like I would have to do with my brokers system. It's well worth the extra $34 a month just in saved labor.
When I do my morning market search, I search each sector methodically and save the chart codes in a folder on the favorites bar (another great feature my brokers system does not have). Once I have weeded out all the markets that don't interst me, I open these saved codes on a different template that I use for market study and determine which one will be the trade of the day. I then open it by hand in the other system so I can pull the trigger.
I also, have ones I watch if I think they are close to a good set up. When I open them in E-signal, I generally enter the exact chart month code rather than using the automatic one just to make sure I am in sync with the other system if I decide to open it up there and place a trade. When I did this, I forgot to make it for march 2012, and put in march 2011 on auto pilot. You'd think I wold have figured out something was wrong after not seeing any movement in the first 5 minutes...Do'H
I like my brokers charting system, but it lacks some key features that make a large scale scan of many markets kind of difficult. The E-signal on demand is delayed, and pretty cheap. By using my brokers basic package instead of their full one, and then E-signals to do my search, I have the best of both worlds...and it's $3 cheaper than the full system my broker offers.
My subscription is delayed though, but E-sig offers full streaming real time platforms as well.
