Most efficient way to get live current bid/ask

[pjsmith]

Hello,

I was wondering if you could just confirm something for me. If I want to get the current bid/ask, there seems to be 2 ways it is done. Via onmarketdata, or GetCurrentBid. My question is, is there any overhead with GetCurrentBid? Only, I see indicators like the price line using onMarketdata, and that would seem to use many more resources than say, a simple function call to getCurrentBid/Ask, if all that function is doing is returning a value it already has to hand?

I did look in the docs, but it really does not go into any detail I could find about how GetCurrentBid actually works, internally. Would I be right in assuming GetCurrenBid, as needed, for example, 'onpricechange', would be more efficient than OnMarketData, where I would assume the entire tick stream is being sent to that function?

Thanks.

[NinjaTrader_Jim]

Hello pjsmith,

Thanks for your post.

GetCurrentBid/GetCurrentAsk will fetch the most recent Bid/Ask straight from the level 1 data feed before the bid/ask gets processed in NinjaTrader's data streams. This would be lighter if you occasionally need to reference a current bid/ask.

Adding OnMarketData would be useful if you needed a stream of bid/ask/last to analyze the data and plot information like we do in an indicator. You are correct that the entire tick stream would be sent here.

Let us know if there is anything else we can do to help.