The symbols Interactive Brokers uses are often not the same one your data feed uses, especially if you are trading something other than stocks. Often the exchange is different too. Therefore, when you set up automatic trading, you need to “map” the data feed symbol to the IB symbol. In other words, NeuroShell translates the symbol for you when it places a trade. However, it is sometimes difficult to find out exactly what to tell NeuroShell to translate too.
For example, suppose you want to trade E-mini Dow futures, whose symbol is YM and it is on the CBOT Exchange. If you want the December 2006 contract, you would choose YMZ6 on most data feeds. That doesn’t work with IB, unfortunately, so you’d have to set up a mapping in NeuroShell (Tools -> Options -> Trading Orders -> Ticker & Exchange Mapping…)
But what should it be mapped to? The key to the correct symbol and exchange discovery is in the IB Trader Workstation (TWS). The first thing you have to do is insert the symbol there. The default way is to insert YM in the “Underlying column” and then press the enter key to get a dialog going to let you choose that you want Futures and the December 2006 USD contract. When you are done you do see that the exchange is ECBOT (the electronic CBOT), but all you see for the symbol is YM.
You can clarify things a little by going to the TWS View menu and select “Symbol Mode” instead of “underlying mode”. Now you can see the correct symbol which is “YM DEC 06”.
But wait! How many spaces are between YM and DEC and how many between DEC and 06? Turns out IB wants that to be exactly right. When we looked we thought there were two and one respectively. We never dreamed there were THREE spaces between YM and DEC, but there are, and you need all three to make IB happy!
There is a quick way you can make sure you have the right symbol before you put it in NeuroShell’s mapping. While still in Symbol Mode, go to the Ticker Menu and select “Add Symbol” . If you can get the symbol accepted by TWS there, then TWS will accept that symbol when NeuroShell sends it.
In the end we had to email IB tech support to find out there were three spaces, because we never dreamed we’d have to enter more than two! So the correct symbol is YMbbbDECb06 where each b is a blank space. If you have to email IB like we did, just tell them you are having trouble getting the symbol accepted in their Ticker -> Add Symbol dialog. If you mention NeuroShell, they will just assume it is a NeuroShell problem.
Here’s another example. To find out all the possible option symbols for Interactive Brokers, when running the Interactive Brokers Traders Workstation, choose Lookup Symbol from the Ticker menu. If you then enter say Russell 2000 and CBOE and ALL contract types, you’ll see a listing of every ticker symbol related to the Russell 2000 including emini futures, futures, options, etc. To see all the Russell 2000 options ticker symbols, select the Show all contacts link next to the Russell 2000 options listing.
The following is a link to IB which shows the Forex symbols they use:
Be sure to set the exchange to “IdealPro”, and the type to “cash” when mapping symbols from the data feed for integrated trading with IB.
PS – As of release 5.4, NeuroShell will tell you the symbol is not recognized by IB if you have not enabled the API in TWS (Configure->API->Enable ActiveX and Socket Clients). So if you are having trouble getting a correct symbol recognized, enable the API, then reboot NeuroShell.