NT7 Ghost Symbols Bug

[molecool]

I have complained about this several times but thus far no response from NT support. Thus I'm sharing this with the wider community in order to gather possible solutions to avoid this problem.

How to re-create::

1. Type in a faux symbol into either an open chart or the Basic Entry panel . It needs to be an incorrect one in order to reliably recreate this. Here is an example:



2. Now go to the instrument manager and sort by 'description'. You will see a new faux stock symbol in your instrument list:



This may not be of major consequence but for some mysterious reason NT7 intermittently also creates stock symbols mirroring existing symbols. I regularly have to clean out faux stock symbols named EURUSD or USDJPY.

And this affects the database - more precisely it has the potential to corrupt it as well as your strategies. Yesterday I tried to remove a EURUSD stock symbol from my instrument list and was unable to do so as NT claimed that it was being used by one of my strategies. I wound up resetting the database in order to solve the issue. But that also wiped out all my workspaces and strategy settings.

Now the issue may be avoided by always typing $EURUSD for currency pairs but that's not really the point. The problem here is that NT7 creates faux stock symbols and I was able to recreate this on two separate installations. I am pretty certain it's an undocumented bug and I yet have to receive acknowledgment of that, let alone ways to address this problem.

[NinjaTrader_Matthew]

Hi mole,

I'm not sure if you're getting all our emails, but I can assure you, as per the message sent yesterday:

We've documented the behavior where typing in the instrument selector for an instrument incorrect adds it as a stock. We're making overall changes here in NinjaTrader 8 which would prevent you from typing into features where we did not design to work.

If you're typing a symbol, without the correct identifier (Forex = $, Index = ^, Future = {symbol } + Expiry}, the on the fly method assumes you're trying to add a stock. Correctly identifying your symbol should prevent the behavior from adding these symbols as stocks.

[molecool]

Hi mole,

I'm not sure if you're getting all our emails, but I can assure you, as per the message sent yesterday:



If you're typing a symbol, without the correct identifier (Forex = $, Index = ^, Future = {symbol } + Expiry}, the on the fly method assumes you're trying to add a stock. Correctly identifying your symbol should prevent the behavior from adding these symbols as stocks.

That particular email I recall but I have already responded to that and did not hear back since yesterday. In essence - NinjaTrader 8 is nothing but a promise at this point - we are not even in alpha let alone beta yet! So we may be over a year, probably two until NT8 is ready for prime time. Can we get some of these glaring issues fixed?

I don't consider the above a feature - nobody ever mentioned this as a 'turn key' method to add symbols. Obviously this would be a very clumsy and error prone way to do that. Just one man's opinion and I would like to hear others chime in.