Using the historical log of alert messages in the Order and Position Tracker

When an indicator or strategy generates an alert, MultiCharts logs that alert in the Order and Position Tracker window. How do we work with that window and which features does it have?

Working with alerts in the Order and Position Tracker window

By programmatically generating alerts we can have our script notify us of certain events, like when a market position closes or an oscillator reaches a certain value. The kind of alerts that we can trigger in MultiCharts are audio alerts, notification windows, and email alerts (MultiCharts Wiki, 2013). But we may not always be sitting at the computer when an alert fires. Luckily, each alert that’s generated programmatically is logged in the ‘Alerts’ tab of the Order and Position Tracker window.

The Order and Position Tracker is a window that provides information about accounts, orders, open positions, strategy positions, error messages, and a log of alerts (MultiCharts Wiki, 2015). We can have this window open in two ways: as a separate, floating window in a particular workspace or as a window panel of the main MultiCharts application. Before discussing how we can use the alerts log in the Order and Position Tracker, let’s explore those two ways of opening the window.

Opening the Order and Position Tracker as a separate window

To open the Order and Position Tracker as a separate window in the current workspace, we click on the ‘File’ menu item and hover to ‘New’ and then select ‘Order and Position Tracker Window’:

Alternatively we can click on the Order and Position Tracker icon ( ) that displays in the MultiCharts toolbar:

Both approaches open a window in MultiCharts that looks like this:

Here the Order and Position Tracker window appears as a separate window, and we can move it around in the workspace just as we do with individual charts.

Opening the Order and Position Tracker as a window panel

The other approach is to display the Order and Position Tracker as a window panel of the main MultiCharts application. This way the Order and Position Tracker and its data is always visible, regardless of which workspace we’re currently working in.

To open the Order and Position Tracker as a window panel, we click on the ‘View’ menu item and select ‘Show Order and Position Tracker Window’ (or press the Ctrl - Shift - O keyboard shortcut):

This opens the Order and Position Tracker in the bottom of the main MultiCharts window, instead of opening it in the current workspace:

Now let’s take a closer look at the ‘Alerts’ tab of the Order and Position Tracker.

The ‘Alerts’ tab in the Order and Position Tracker in MultiCharts

As we discussed above, the Order and Position Tracker window contains a log of all alert messages. That window’s ‘Alerts’ tab looks like:

Features of the ‘Alerts’ tab include configuring how the information is presented, filtering which alerts are displayed, and searching for a specific alert. Let’s start by adjusting its appearance.

Changing the look of MultiCharts’ Order and Position Tracker

We can adjust the look of the ‘Alerts’ tab in two ways: by changing the formatting of the table with the alert data, and by adjusting which columns display and how they’re ordered. Both help with scanning and reviewing the information that’s in the Order and Position Tracker.

Let’s start with the first: changing the look of the table with information. To do that we right-click somewhere in the table, which opens the following menu:

Here we have several options to configure the appearance, like adjusting the text size or theme colour. For example, selecting the ‘Theme’ menu item and then choosing ‘White’ changes the Order and Position Tracker to:

The other way to change the ‘Alerts’ tab is by changing how the columns and rows look like. For this we right-click on a column, which brings up the following menu:

Here we can enable or disable each of the available columns with the checkmark before the column. We can also change the alignment of the text inside the cells of that column.

Another way to change the appearance of the Order and Position Tracker is to enable (or disable) columns and change their order. To disable a column, we right-click in the table header and then remove the checkmark placed before the column name. For instance, here we’ve disabled the ‘Resolution’ and ‘Price’ columns:

Re-arranging columns requires clicking on the column head and holding down the left mouse button. We can then drag the column to the left or right, and a blue downward-pointing arrow will appear to highlight the column’s position after releasing the mouse button.

For example, here we drag the ‘Instrument’ column between the ‘Date/Time’ and ‘Source’ columns:

After releasing the mouse button, the ‘Instrument’ column moves between ‘Date/Time’ and ‘Source’:

Reviewing alerts in MultiCharts’ Order and Position Tracker

Based on the information that those different columns in the Order and Position Tracker provide, we can do the following things in the ‘Alerts’ tab:

• Filter alerts on based on which script generated them (the alert ‘source’),
• Filter alerts based on a time range,
• And search through the ‘Alerts’ tab to locate specific alerts.

We take a closer look at each feature below.

Filtering MultiCharts alerts based on the script that generated them

We use the ‘Source’ pull-down menu in the top left of the Order and Position Tracker to filter the alert messages based on which script fired the alert. What that option we specify which alerts should be included in the ‘Alerts’ table.

With the ‘Source’ option set to ‘All’, every alert message displays in the ‘Alerts’ tab:

When we set that option to ‘Bollinger Bands’, only alerts generated by that script are shown in the alerts log:

Filtering MultiCharts alerts based on a time range

The second filter that we can apply to the ‘Alerts’ tab is a time range set by a start and end date. For this we manually type in those dates in the ‘From’ and ‘To’ options, or click on the calendar icon that’s displayed to the right of those dates:

(Both the dates and calender use the computer’s language, which is why they display in Dutch on my computer.)

With this filter we can easily find alerts that happened during a certain time period. For example, to show all alerts that fired in the second half of April we configure the ‘From’ and ‘To’ dates like this:

This way no alert outside this time period appears in the ‘Alerts’ tab of the Order and Position Tracker window.

Searching alerts in the Order and Position Tracker

While the above two filters reduce the noise in the Order and Position Tracker, the most efficient way of finding a specific alert is to search for it. For that we first select any cell in the table of the ‘Alerts’ tab, and then press the Ctrl - F keyboard shortcut to open the ‘Find Text’ window:

(This ‘Find Text’ window uses the language of your Windows version, and so probably looks different than mine here that uses Dutch.)

In the ‘Find Text’ window we can type in our query and press Enter or click on the equivalent of ‘Search next’ in your language. The highlighted cell in the Order and Position Tracker window will then jump to the first occurrence that matches the search command. For example:

Summary

MultiCharts alerts can generate as notification windows, audio alerts, and email alerts. And any alert that’s generated programmatically also shows up in the ‘Alerts’ tab of the Order and Position Tracker window. We can display that MultiCharts tool as a separate window in the current workspace or as a window panel that’s accessible from all workspaces. Inside the ‘Alerts’ tab, we can filter alerts based on ‘Source’ (that is, the script which triggered the alert) and a time range with the ‘From’ and ‘To’ options. The columns displayed in this tab are the date and time of the alert, the script that generated the alert, the instrument and resolution on which that script calculated, the instrument’s price when the alert fired, and optionally the alert message.