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Being frustrated with NT8, I'm playing around with Sierra.
I loaded 24 months of the continuous intra-day CL contract and it's bugging the hell outta me that whenever I switch the timeframe (say, from 15min chart to 5min chart) I have to wait another minute or two while Sierra loads each individual contract month all over again from the beginning.
Is there anyway around this?
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
A solution would be to have a chartbook with all different timeframes in separate charts and you just scroll through the charts instead of loading from scratch every time
^^ This. Sierra is really light on resources; I have every timeframe I use loaded up and ready to go so I can switch between them easily. I also have a separate chartbook loaded up with my higher timeframe charts so that I can instantly switch full screens from LTF to HTF and back with the click of a mouse.
The only time I ever change the timeframe of an existing chart is if I want to mark up HTF points of interest on a LTF chart and then switch back to the original timeframe.
When I first started using SierraChart I had the same thought. After using it for a bit, I realized the developers who created SierraChart have reasons for nearly everything (with a few exceptions that I don't feel make sense). There are many advantages for having individual files for each contract.
A few come to mind although your usage may differ:
1) Lack of redundant data - instead of storing a continuous future as one large file you have files for each contract. It's easy to go back and open any historical contract by itself
2) You can easily change your rollover and/or backadjustment rules without requiring new data. I frequently switch between backadjusted and non-backadjusted charts and it doesn't require 2 sets of data.
3) You can easily plot multiple symbols on the same chart so sometimes it's helpful to plot multiple contracts in a non-continuous fashion to view things like volume/open interest changes. This way, you can see volume fade out of one contract and into the next without using a strict rollover rule.
Some ideas for you:
Is 1-tick data an absolute requirement? If you can reduce the data fidelity at all it will greatly reduce load times. When looking at 24 months of data I would assume you could reduce your data to multiple ticks or even seconds.
I think many people misunderstand how this actually works. It's always said that "you need tick data to have accurate volume/delta information" but SierraChart has a unique way of dealing with this. By default all data is downloaded and stored on your hard drive in 1-tick increments. Every single tick is a new entry in the data file. If you choose to store data as 4-tick intervals SierraChart aggregates every 4 ticks into a single entry so you still have *nearly* perfect volume/delta data but it may differ slightly.
If you are looking at 3 or 10 tick charts you would lose too much information with this compression. However, if you are viewing mostly higher timeframes (100+ tick or 1+ minute) then you can surely get away with storing data at a lower fidelity.
Your charts will load MUCH faster, you'll take up less space on the hard drive, and downloads for new symbols will take place much more quickly.
