Connect Touchance to MultiCharts for Quotes and Orders

Contents

1. Can Touchance connect to MultiCharts? Which path do quotes and orders take
2. What do Touchance and MultiCharts each handle?
3. How do quotes get into MultiCharts? From opening Touchance to the first chart
4. How much order latency does MultiCharts have through Touchance?
5. How much does it cost to connect Touchance to MultiCharts? Adding up both products
6. Do you need to buy both Touchance and MultiCharts? Three setups, and when one is enough
7. Once the strategy is written, how do you connect it to the quote and order chain?
8. Frequently asked questions
9. References

Can Touchance connect to MultiCharts? Which path do quotes and orders take

Yes. Touchance plugs into MultiCharts as an add-on and acts as both the quote source and the order channel: quotes flow from the broker's host through Touchance into MultiCharts' QuoteManager and are drawn as bars, while orders go from a MultiCharts strategy or a manual order through Touchance to the broker's host. The Touchance–MultiCharts link is really two paths running in opposite directions, so set up and check each one separately.

A quote source is where MultiCharts receives live prices and historical bars. QuoteManager is the MultiCharts module that manages quote sources, symbol lists and historical data. The order channel is the line that sends orders out and brings fill confirmations back. Think of two one-way streets: one carries prices in, the other carries orders out; fill confirmations then travel back along the order path to MultiCharts, so the strategy knows how many contracts it actually holds.

The benefit of treating the two paths separately is that you can find the problem. If the chart does not tick, the quote path is down, and the broker account has nothing to do with it; if an order does not go out, the cause is the order path's settings or connection, and the chart keeps ticking as usual. If you think of the two paths as one, you often look for the cause in the wrong place.

What do Touchance and MultiCharts each handle?

Touchance handles the connections and MultiCharts handles the decisions; with one side missing you can do only half the job. Touchance is a quote and order program developed by Kway Information and offered to clients by several Taiwan futures brokers; it logs in to the broker account, receives live exchange quotes, sends orders to the broker's host and takes fill confirmations back. MultiCharts is an analysis environment for charting, backtesting, optimization and running PowerLanguage strategies; it stores historical bars, computes indicators and decides entries and exits.

Task	Touchance	MultiCharts
Connect to the broker account	Handles	Does not do
Receive live quotes	Handles, passes to MultiCharts	Draws charts after receiving
Store historical bars	Does not do	Handles (QuoteManager)
Backtesting and optimization	Does not do	Handles
Run PowerLanguage strategies	Does not do	Handles
Send orders to the broker	Handles	Generates the order, hands it to Touchance
Fill confirmations	Handles, passes back to MultiCharts	Updates the strategy position after receiving

A common misunderstanding is to treat MultiCharts as software that connects to a broker on its own. It does not. Without Touchance or another quote source, MultiCharts opens to an empty chart; without MultiCharts, Touchance can show charts and take manual orders but cannot run PowerLanguage strategies. For what Touchance offers, which brokers provide it and whether it can run a strategy on its own, see What Is Touchance? Features, Fees, Supported Brokers, and Whether It Can Run a Strategy.

How do quotes get into MultiCharts? From opening Touchance to the first chart

The quote connection takes five steps, and each has a result you can check on the spot, so doing them in order keeps you from getting stuck with no clue why. Order matters: if Touchance is not logged in, the QuoteManager settings that follow will look normal but never receive a price.

1. Log in to Touchance. Use the account your broker gave you. Check: Touchance's connection status shows connected and the symbol prices in the quote window tick.
2. Turn on the MultiCharts connection feature in Touchance. This switch lets Touchance provide quotes and accept orders externally. Check: Touchance shows the MultiCharts connection as enabled or waiting for a connection.
3. Add Touchance as a quote source in QuoteManager. After adding it, put the symbols you want to trade in the symbol list. Check: the symbol appears in the list and its quote source column says Touchance.
4. Map symbol codes and trading sessions. Symbol mapping is the setting that pairs the symbol name on a MultiCharts chart with the symbol code at Touchance and the broker; the order path relies on it to decide which symbol an order goes to. The session template decides when bars start and end and whether daily bars include the night session. Check: every symbol you plan to trade has an entry in the mapping table, and the session table matches the session you actually trade. You can cross-check each exchange's sessions in Taiwan time with the free futures market hours tool.
5. Open a chart and confirm historical and live bars connect. Let the historical bars finish loading first, then see whether the latest bar moves with trades. Check: there is no gap between the last historical bar and the first live bar, and no duplicated bar.

The session setting in step 4 is the easiest to overlook. TAIEX futures have a day session and a night session; pick the wrong session template and the daily open and close will not match your broker statement, and the bars your strategy saw in the backtest are not the same bars it sees when trading. After step 5, the quote path works; for the order path, you separately choose Touchance in the broker profile in MultiCharts and turn on automated trading on the chart, and only then are both paths connected.

How much order latency does MultiCharts have through Touchance?

There is no millisecond figure that holds for everyone; the right approach is to measure your own. Latency is the time from a strategy signal being generated in MultiCharts to the order being filled at the exchange. That time passes through four nodes: MultiCharts finishes computing the signal and sends the order, Touchance receives it and forwards it, the broker's host runs its risk checks and sends it to the exchange, and the exchange matches it. Each hop adds some time, and each hop's time depends on your computer, your network, the broker's host and the market at that moment. A number someone else measured is not your number.

The good news is that two of the four nodes give you timestamps you can get yourself. The MultiCharts order and position tracking window records each order's signal time and send time; Touchance's order report records when the broker's host received the order and when it filled. Subtract one from the other and you have the latency of this connection on your machine. Also record the strategy's signal price and the actual fill price; the difference in ticks is the slippage of your connection. Slippage is the gap between the fill price a backtest assumes and the actual fill price. Here is how to measure:

1. Turn on automated trading and run live for a while with the smallest contract size; do not use a simulated account, because simulated matching time is not the broker host's time.
2. For every order, write down MultiCharts' signal time, Touchance's order report time, the signal price and the fill price.
3. After a few dozen orders, look at the typical and worst values of the time gap and price gap, not just the average.
4. Convert the typical price gap into the backtest's per-side slippage, then run a stress test at twice that gap. For how to set it, see trading costs in backtests: commission, slippage and the average trade.

To compare with a backtest report, convert ticks to money. For NQ, the CME contract specifications page states that one tick is 0.25 points and $5 per tick, so 2 ticks of slippage is $10 per side. The exchange may change contract specifications, so go by the exchange's contract specifications page; you can look up each product's tick value and point value with the free futures contract calculator.

How much does it cost to connect Touchance to MultiCharts? Adding up both products

The total cost has three parts: the MultiCharts license, the Touchance usage fee and the exchange quote fee, and the last two mostly vary by the broker you open an account with, so confirm the figures with your own broker. This section only says what each item is, who it is paid to and what period it is usually billed on, so you know the three questions to ask your broker.

Cost item	Paid to	Billing period	Who to confirm with
MultiCharts license	MultiCharts reseller	One-time purchase or annual	The reseller's quote
Touchance usage fee	Broker or Kway Information	Monthly, or waived under broker terms	Your broker
Exchange quote fee	Paid to the exchange through the broker	Monthly	Your broker

The one most often underestimated of the three is the exchange quote fee. It is not a software fee; it is what the exchange whose data you want to see charges for live quotes, domestic and overseas exchanges bill differently, and each exchange whose products you add may add another charge. Some brokers include the Touchance usage fee and part of the quote fees in their account terms and waive them once you reach a certain trading volume; the terms are in the broker's contract and fee schedule, not in the software manual. Once you have asked about all three, multiply the monthly parts by twelve and add the MultiCharts license, and that is the real total for a year.

Do you need to buy both Touchance and MultiCharts? Three setups, and when one is enough

Whether you need both depends on what you want to do, not on which one is better. For charts plus manual orders, Touchance alone is enough; for backtesting and research only, with no plan to automate orders, MultiCharts with another quote source is enough; to have PowerLanguage strategies place orders automatically at a Taiwan broker, you need both together.

What you want to do	Touchance only	MultiCharts with another quote source	Both together
Charts and manual orders	Yes	Charts yes; orders need a separate broker connection	Yes
Backtesting and optimization	No	Yes	Yes
PowerLanguage strategies placing orders automatically at a Taiwan broker	No	No, no order channel	Yes
How much setup to learn	Little: log in and go	Medium: set up quote source and sessions	A lot: both paths need setup

The three setups from left to right can be treated as three stages. Someone just starting program trading first writes the strategy and backtests it clearly in MultiCharts, and this stage needs no order channel; Program trading for TAIEX futures: zero to first strategy, no coding covers exactly this stretch. Once the strategy has run through backtest, out-of-sample and paper trading, and you have measured latency and slippage, add Touchance to connect the order path. Paying for both before you start writing strategies often means a year has been paid and the first automated order still has not gone out.

Once the strategy is written, how do you connect it to the quote and order chain?

Before a strategy enters the Touchance plus MultiCharts chain, confirm that three backtest settings match the live connection: commission, slippage and next-bar entry. Next-bar entry means the strategy decides at a bar's close and fills at the next bar's open; deciding on the close and then filling at that same bar's close price is something a live connection cannot do. Pardo (2008) lists execution assumptions of this kind as one of the main sources of the gap between backtest and live results. Every strategy evaluation in AlphaPrime (Valynox) includes commission, slippage and next-bar entry, so what you check before export is whether these figures match the numbers you measured in the fourth section.

The backtest below is the comparison example attached to this article. It tests NQ daily bars from 2019-01-02 to 2025-06-30, long and short, 1 contract, with $20 commission per trade and $10 slippage. It uses a stand-in rule built from a standard indicator as the only entry and exit, with no stop loss, no target and no filter; it tests this checking process, not how much the Touchance plus MultiCharts connection can earn. It is the one kept from 1,024 candidates by return relative to drawdown; picking the best performer afterward makes the numbers look good by itself, and Bailey et al. (2014) explain why the more candidates are compared, the more the best one is overestimated. The figures in the table are not a forecast, and not a result this rule or any reader can expect to get.

What to check in this table is not net profit but the cost row and the number of trades. This candidate has 60 trades and 85.7% time in market, a slow-turnover rule; the $10 slippage per trade equals 2 ticks on NQ, and if the typical slippage you measured is 4 ticks, change slippage to $20 and rerun to see how much profit factor is left. A slow-turnover rule is not sensitive to slippage, while a day-trading rule may flip negative from one extra tick. That is why the fourth section has you measure first and then go back and change the backtest settings, not the other way round.

With costs checked, the next step is moving the rule into MultiCharts. AlphaPrime exports the kept candidate as PowerLanguage source code; the other platforms that support export are listed on the platform export support list. After importing into MultiCharts, run it once on the same historical data with the same commission and slippage settings and compare the number of trades and entry and exit times; the steps are in how to import a strategy into MultiCharts and match the backtest, and the settings to check item by item are in the PowerLanguage comparison checklist from generated strategy to MultiCharts. Only after they line up do you pick the Touchance broker profile on the chart and turn on automated trading with the smallest contract count.

A next step you can take today: open MultiCharts' order and position tracking window and Touchance's order report, send three market orders by hand with the smallest contract count, and write down the difference between signal price and fill price. Those three tick counts are your starting point for the backtest slippage field.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to use Touchance as the quote source for MultiCharts?

Not necessarily. QuoteManager can manage several quote sources at once, and Touchance is one that Taiwan futures brokers commonly offer. For backtesting and research alone, any quote source that provides the symbols and sessions you need will do. To have strategies place orders automatically at a Taiwan broker, Touchance is also the order channel, and using it as the quote source then saves you setting up one connection.

What happens to a MultiCharts strategy when Touchance disconnects?

The order path breaks and MultiCharts cannot send new orders, but your position at the broker is still there. After reconnecting, first compare the actual position shown in Touchance with the position the MultiCharts strategy believes it has; if they differ, go by the broker, flatten or adjust the strategy position by hand, then turn automated trading back on. The quote path usually drops at the same time, so the chart stops ticking, which can serve as the first sign of a disconnect.

Do the historical bars used in backtests also come from Touchance?

Once connected, MultiCharts stores the prices Touchance sends in QuoteManager, and later bars accumulate there; how much history you can backfill depends on what the quote source provides. If the history is not long enough, MultiCharts can also import bar data from text files you prepare yourself. Before backtesting, confirm that the session template and the time slicing of the imported data agree, otherwise the daily bars will not line up.

Is a market order or a limit order better when MultiCharts places orders through Touchance?

Both can be sent; the difference is fill certainty and fill price. A market order almost always fills, but the fill price will be a few ticks away from the signal price, and that gap is slippage; a limit order locks the price but may not fill. In a backtest, set things according to the order type you will actually use: for market orders, enter the slippage you measured; for limit orders, you cannot assume every touch of the price gets filled.

References

• CME Group. E-mini Nasdaq-100 Futures Contract Specs. https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/equities/nasdaq/e-mini-nasdaq-100.contractSpecs.html
• Pardo, R. (2008). The Evaluation and Optimization of Trading Strategies (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
• Bailey, D. H., Borwein, J., López de Prado, M., & Zhu, Q. J. (2014). Pseudo-Mathematics and Financial Charlatanism: The Effects of Backtest Overfitting on Out-of-Sample Performance. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 61(5), 458–471.