Also referring to my last post : https://www.prorealcode.com/topic/premarket-and-after-hours-2/page/2/#post-249771 , forget about Extendeed Trading Hours for IG.
In between the lines a small correction to that post : I said or implied that After Market bears a pause for Stocks, but this was not correct. After Market starts at 9pm “your time” (UK) and ends at 1am. Then premarket starts at 9am and ends at 2:30pm – then regular trading starts (until 9pm).
Because it seemed to be an opportunity to use PRT-IG for autotrading Stocks (Shares), I thought to set up something for that, knowing that trading is possible, no matter the time does not advance (see previous posts). But then I found that all is “fake” anyway. There is no such thing as real Extended Trading Hours like with other brokers who make use of real exchanges. Not for Stocks. It is just the totally unusable “internal community” trading of IG (the you and me thing) which bears no volatility at all. Below a comparison on a random day between IG (left/green) and IBKR (blue), seen through PRT.
Note : these are Amst times now, thus all one hour later than mentioned in my posts.
The comparison is not easy to make because of the required zoom levels to show something with sense, and because there are hardly bars present for IG, at the time scale nothing much shows. There is some, but it hardly is anything. Compare that with the 2nd screenshot from PRT-IB and see that bars (of 21 seconds each) normally progress throughout the Extended Trading Hours.
Do note and know that when no trades occur within a bar, PRT does not show the bar either (and they are also not exposed to your program code for autotrading).
There is some more than the eye can see, because while you would be able to trade the IG bars for as far as they exist, all kind of special IG rules will prohibit that. Googling a bit will tell you that Stop orders and other pending orders will trigger within ETH but will only be executed during RTH. Aha. So now it is really useless. And oh, Market Orders will execute (as far as I can determine), but with a spread from here to eternity.
And so we must forget about this. 🙁 🙁
I myself am disappointed because since two weeks or so I am interested in autotrading Stocks because I developed a nice system for them – actually knowing it would not be applicable anyway. This thread initially made me think differently, but now to no avail. This all also with the notice that PRT-IB does not allow autotrading for normal stocks at all – only a selected group of financial futures, FX pairs, commodities and metals is allowed.
… So maybe I must try to encourage ProRealTime to allow autotrading for a couple of larger cap stocks (Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla, Apple). This is not for the faint-hearted anyway, because it would imply jumps of 10% easily (while Futures would only do that in very rare occasions/situations (like Corona)) and losing 10% on a Stock in one go is not something your “provider” (ProRealTime) would adhere.
Lastly on this subject, people should not be too enthusiastic about this, because we should keep in mind that Stocks bear a margin of 20%, generally. That is far from the 5%, 3% or even less we are used to with the autotrading we do within PRT-IG (or -IB for that matter).