Instruments

An important premise. QANTHOS is an analysis, validation and discovery tool, not a financial advisor. The data you enter here (margins, thresholds, traded contract) feeds objective calculations — like the capital needed for a portfolio — but operational decisions remain yours. The thresholds you set (starting with Min Avg Trade) are personal prudence choices, not universal rules: they depend on your style, your costs and your broker.

1. What the instrument sheet is really for

A strategy, on its own, is just a sequence of trades on a chart. To understand whether it’s genuinely tradable you need information about the underlying market that the backtest report doesn’t contain: how much capital a position ties up, how much margin it costs to hold it overnight, which contract you’ll actually execute it on. The Instruments tab is where QANTHOS gathers and keeps this information, once and for all, and makes it available to every other module.

In practice, the sheets you fill in here get used downstream to answer very concrete questions, for example:

• How much capital do I need to trade this portfolio? QANTHOS sums each position’s real margins (intraday and overnight) to estimate the portfolio’s required margin and, consequently, the capital needed to sustain it.
• Does this strategy make sense, net of costs? By comparing the strategy’s average trade with the Min Avg Trade you’ve set for that market, QANTHOS flags strategies whose average per-trade gain is too thin to be traded profitably.

This is why the instrument sheet matters so much: it isn’t a decorative archive, it’s the set of parameters underpinning analyses that will use real euro and dollar figures. An incomplete or wrong sheet doesn’t block QANTHOS, but it makes those analyses less reliable.

2. First launch: from empty table to “Sync Strategies”

The first time you open the tab, the instrument table is empty: QANTHOS doesn’t yet know which markets you trade. You don’t need to enter them by hand one by one.

Prerequisite. Sync works on the currently loaded portfolio: make sure you’ve loaded a portfolio from the Strategies tab first. Without it, QANTHOS flags this and populates nothing.

The key button is 🔄 Sync Strategies: with one click QANTHOS reads each loaded portfolio strategy’s ticker — the same one declared in the //META:TICKER tag at export time — and populates the table with every instrument appearing there, one per row. Before adding anything it shows a summary (how many total tickers, how many already present, how many new) and asks for confirmation.

For markets QANTHOS recognizes, the row is created already pre-filled with sensible data (product name, point value, reference margins); for tickers it doesn’t know, it creates a row with generic default values and prompts you to verify them. Either way, you have a base to work from in seconds instead of starting from a blank sheet.

It also self-populates on its own. On tab launch, QANTHOS runs a silent sync: if it finds tickers in the loaded portfolio not yet in the table, it adds them without bothering you. The Sync Strategies button remains useful to force an update after you’ve changed portfolio or added strategies on new markets.

3. The ticker sheet: the two fields to curate by hand

A double-click on a ticker’s row opens its detail sheet, where you see and edit all its parameters. Most fill in on their own (see §4), but two fields deserve your attention because they express choices only you can make.

3.1 Traded On — the contract you actually trade

It’s common for a strategy to be developed and tested on one contract, but executed on another. The typical case is going from a standard future to a micro: you develop on NQ but, to better dose risk, in real trading you’ll trade MNQ. The Traded On field is exactly for this: you indicate the contract you’ll really trade on, even if different from the one the report was extracted from.

It’s not a cosmetic detail. When Traded On differs from the original ticker, QANTHOS computes a rescaling factor (the Rescaling column) based on the ratio between the two contracts’ point values, and reproportions the strategy’s results accordingly. Trading NQ versus its micro MNQ substantially changes capital committed, margins and the size of profits and losses: declaring it here makes all downstream analyses reason on the right contract’s numbers.

If you trade the same contract the report was extracted from, just leave Traded On equal to the ticker: the rescaling factor stays 1.0x and nothing changes.

3.2 Min Avg Trade — the tradability threshold

The Min Avg Trade is the minimum average trade a strategy on that underlying must have to be considered tradable. In other words, it’s the answer to: “how much must a strategy on this market earn on average per trade, for it to be worth trading?”.

You set it, market by market, because the answer depends on commission costs, slippage, and your personal convenience threshold. Once set, QANTHOS uses it as a reality filter: strategies with a lower average trade are flagged as non-tradable, regardless of how good their other metrics look (see §6).

A note if you use micros. If you’ve set a Traded On on a micro contract, QANTHOS can use a Min Avg Trade threshold specific to that contract: consistent, since on a micro the average trade in currency terms is proportionally smaller.

4. The Interactive Brokers connection: everything else automatic

Margins, trading sessions and reference exchanges are data that change over time and that it makes no sense to enter by hand. QANTHOS fetches them directly from Interactive Brokers, connecting to a Trader Workstation (TWS) or IB Gateway session running on your computer.

The connection is read-only. QANTHOS connects to the IB platform only to read, never to trade: it never sends orders or positions and doesn’t modify anything on your account. In this tab it only queries contract reference data — margins, market sessions, exchanges. Elsewhere (for example in the Monitoring tab) it can read open positions, but in no case does it read your account number or account balance/amount, nor any other personal or sensitive data.

To use it, you just need TWS or IB Gateway open with API access enabled. Connection parameters (address and port) are set in QANTHOS from the Settings → Interactive Brokers menu; normally the connection is local, at address 127.0.0.1 on TWS’s port 7497. From there, two buttons do all the work:

The result is that, after connecting the platform and pressing these two buttons, almost the entire instrument sheet is filled in with real, up-to-date values. All you have left is curating the two choice fields — Traded On and Min Avg Trade — seen in §3.

You can always correct by hand. If you think an automatically updated value (for example a margin) is wrong, you can overwrite it in the ticker’s sheet: your edit becomes permanent and won’t be touched by subsequent IB syncs again. If later you want that field to go back to being managed automatically by the QANTHOS–IB pair, just clear it and leave the field empty: at the next useful update QANTHOS will repopulate it on its own.

5. Reading the table

Each row is an instrument; the columns describe its reference data and operational parameters. The main ones:

• Ticker — the market symbol, as it appears in reports.
• Product Name / Type / Asset Class — description, category (Future, Forex, Crypto, CFD) and asset class. The Filter by type menu at the top narrows the view to a single category.
• Point Value — the value of one price point for the original contract.
• Traded On / Traded BPV / Rescaling — the actually traded contract, its point value and the rescaling factor against the original (§3.1).
• Min Avg Trade — the tradability threshold you’ve set (§3.2).
• ID Margin / ON Margin — intraday and overnight margin, in the contract’s currency (§4).
• Session / Exchange — market hours and reference exchange (§4).
• Currency / Group / Slippage — contract currency, grouping and estimated slippage.

Cells still to be configured show a dash (—): QANTHOS’s way of telling you “data missing here”, for example a session not yet downloaded. Hovering over the Session cell, a tooltip shows the full detail (timezone, open, close, source and last-update date).

Besides syncing, the toolbar offers ➕ Add Instrument to manually enter a market not present in the reports, and 📤 Export / 📥 Import Config to save and reload the entire instruments configuration as a JSON file — handy for moving it to another PC without reconfiguring everything.

6. Why configuring it well is crucial

Worth insisting on this point, because it’s why you spend a few minutes on the Instruments tab at the start. The information you enter here doesn’t stay confined to this page: it’s the raw material for calculations you’ll find in other modules.

Two examples among many:

1. Margins → required capital. Computing a portfolio’s required margin — and therefore the capital you need to trade it sustainably — relies entirely on each instrument’s intraday and overnight margins. Wrong margins mean wrong capital estimates.
2. Min Avg Trade → real tradability. A strategy can have an excellent Sortino Ratio, an enviable Sharpe Ratio and a high Profit Factor and yet not be tradable profitably, simply because its average trade is too small to cover position-management costs and leave the trader a gain. Risk-adjusted metrics measure the equity curve’s shape, not the single trade’s headroom: Min Avg Trade is what tests the latter. A common-sense check separating strategies that “look good on paper” from those that hold up against real-world costs.

In short: great metrics are a necessary but not sufficient condition. The instrument sheet, correctly configured, is what lets QANTHOS also apply the sufficient conditions — capital and per-trade headroom — to the analyses you’ll run.

7. Common issues and how to avoid them

7.1 “The table is empty and Sync Strategies adds nothing”

Almost always missing a loaded portfolio: sync reads tickers from the active portfolio. Load a portfolio from the Strategies tab first, then press Sync Strategies again.

7.2 “Margins are zero or won’t update”

Updating margins requires an open TWS or IB Gateway session with API access enabled. Check the platform is running and the connection parameters (address and port) set in QANTHOS under Settings → Interactive Brokers match the platform’s, then press Update Futures Margins.

7.3 “Capital analyses look off”

Check two things: that margins were updated from IB (not generic defaults) and that the Traded On field reflects the contract you’ll really trade. A Traded On left on the standard future while you’re operating the micro (or vice versa) significantly shifts margin and capital figures.

7.4 “I added a new market but it has strange values”

Tickers QANTHOS doesn’t recognize are created with generic default values. Open their sheet with a double-click, check the base parameters and — if it’s a future — update margins and sessions from the IB platform.

8. A typical workflow

For those configuring the Instruments tab for the first time:

1. Load a portfolio from the Strategies tab (the instrument sheet works on that one).
2. In the Instruments tab, press 🔄 Sync Strategies and confirm adding the tickers found.
3. Open TWS or IB Gateway with API access enabled.
4. Press 💰 Update Futures Margins then 🕐 Update Sessions: margins, sessions and exchanges fill in on their own.
5. For every ticker you’ll trade on a different contract than the development one (e.g. NQ → MNQ), open the sheet with a double-click and set Traded On.
6. Still in the sheet, set the Min Avg Trade you consider the minimum tradability threshold for that market.
7. (Optional) Export the configuration with 📤 Export Config to reuse or archive it.

Once done, the instrument sheet is ready and you won’t need to touch it again, except to periodically update margins or add new markets as they enter the portfolio. From here on, every analysis QANTHOS produces — required capital, tradability filters, and much more — will rest on real data.

9. To learn more

• Strategies Tab — how strategies are loaded and where the tickers come from.
• Money Management — how margins and capital feed into portfolio sizing.
• Historical Margin Analysis — how QANTHOS reconstructs the required margin over time.