Monitoring

An important premise — and the broker integration’s scope. QANTHOS is an analysis and monitoring tool, not a financial advisor nor an automated trading system. In particular, this tab’s Interactive Brokers (IB/TWS) integration only reads open positions to reconcile them against the expected portfolio: it never reads account numbers or balances, and never sends orders. Placing orders, turning off strategies, correcting sizes remain actions you carry out on your trading software.

1. What it monitors: the live portfolio

Monitoring has one source: the portfolio you’ve marked live in the Builder. When you press Mark as live, QANTHOS freezes rules and composition into an immutable slot; Monitoring reads that, and automatically reacts when it changes (a new Mark as live, or advancing to a subsequent operational rotation). If no portfolio is marked live, the tab says so clearly and waits.

From this live composition, Monitoring derives the list of strategies to watch, their sizes, tickers and classes — and continuously compares them against what it observes in operational reality.

2. Starting monitoring

Monitoring doesn’t start on its own: you turn it on. Three controls in the header govern it:

For monitoring to actually work you need to point it, in settings, to your trading software’s (MultiCharts) report folder: that’s where QANTHOS reads closed trades and strategy status from. Without that folder, the comparison-with-reality part stays inactive.

Startup = heavy lifting. On the first Refresh after startup, QANTHOS reads reports from disk: it can take a few seconds. A loading dialog flags this. Normal.

3. Header and counter bar

Right below the title, a set of indicators summarizes the live portfolio’s status at a glance.

In the header: the current rotation’s validity (◷ start – end date, or “ongoing”); the Max Margin — the portfolio’s worst-case margin, computed as if all strategies were simultaneously in position (if margin data is missing for some ticker, the indicator flags it with ⚠️ rather than silently underestimating); the status icon (active/not active) and the last update time.

In the counter bar: the three counts ● Active / ● Warning / ● Inactive; the IB Daily P&L (the daily P&L read from IB, realized + unrealized, when connected); the rotation P&L (“Rotation: $X (N trades)”) — the portfolio’s result since the current rotation started, derived from closed trades; and the ● MC indicator, which summarizes alignment with MultiCharts with a colour (see §5). The MC indicator is clickable and shows the misalignment detail in a tooltip.

4. The strategies table

The tab’s core is the table on the left: one row per strategy in the live portfolio (rotational model, no Long/Short distinction). The columns:

Two flags deserve particular attention, because they’re the tab’s real purpose:

Expected strategy missing on MultiCharts. If a strategy is in the live portfolio but doesn’t show on MultiCharts, the St cell turns orange (warning): it should be running and isn’t.

“Orphan” strategy (red row). If a strategy is running on MultiCharts that isn’t in the live portfolio, Monitoring adds a red row with the note “Live on MC, not in portfolio”. The trickiest case: you’re trading something the current portfolio doesn’t call for.

Strategies Money Management has brought down to size 0 (allocation under half a contract) don’t appear in the table: they’re not part of the operational portfolio. But if they’re still running on MultiCharts anyway, the “orphan” logic catches them all the same.

5. Portfolio ↔ MultiCharts alignment

The ● MC indicator in the counter bar summarizes the ongoing comparison between what the live portfolio expects and what’s actually running on MultiCharts. Clicking it (or hovering) shows the detail in four categories:

• Aligned — present in both and consistent.
• Missing on MC — in the portfolio but not active on MultiCharts.
• Active not in portfolio — running on MC but not in the portfolio (the “orphans”, to be turned off).
• Autotrading OFF — present but with autotrading disabled.

When alignment status changes, QANTHOS notifies you (if notifications are enabled), so you don’t have to keep an eye on the indicator constantly. “Active not in portfolio” strategies have maximum visual priority, because they represent unplanned exposure.

The comparison relies on status files exported by your trading software. Some information — like the size detected on MultiCharts — requires a sufficiently recent version of the export component; if unavailable, the Size column shows only the expected contracts without the comparison.

6. IB Reconciliation

The IB Reconciliation sub-tab, in the right column, reconciles the live portfolio with your open positions at Interactive Brokers. Used to verify that positions actually held match what the active strategies expect.

Here, even more than elsewhere, the scope declared in the premise applies: the integration only reads open positions (and possibly the aggregated daily P&L you see in the counter bar). It never accesses account numbers or balances, and never sends orders. It’s a reconciliation tool, not an execution one: it shows you a discrepancy, but you fix it on your own software.

The IB/TWS connection is configured in settings (host, port, optional auto-connect) — see §10.

7. Slippage: the gap between theory and execution reality

Every strategy, in QANTHOS as in MultiCharts, reasons on a theoretical entry price: the one the strategy’s report declares as the entry. But the price the order is actually executed at with the broker — the real fill reported by Interactive Brokers — is almost always slightly different. That difference is called slippage, and Monitoring tracks it automatically, fill by fill, comparing each IB execution against the corresponding theoretical MC price.

Why this is one of the tab’s most important features. Every metric guiding your decisions — Sharpe, Profit Factor, Min Avg Trade, the whole anti-overfitting analysis suite — is computed on theoretical backtest or report prices. Slippage is the system’s only point where that theoretical world gets compared, systematically and with real data, against what the broker actually executes. An edge that looks solid on paper can be eroded — partly or almost entirely — by persistent unfavourable slippage. Without this tracking, that erosion would stay invisible until it showed up as a plain “live underperforms the backtest”, with no identifiable cause.

7.1 How a slippage record is born

Tracking triggers automatically on every fill received from Interactive Brokers, while monitoring is active and IB is connected. A few precise rules govern when and how:

• Only on position openings. Slippage is measured only when the fill opens (or increases) a position in the same direction as the corresponding MC strategy: on closes there’s no reference theoretical price to compare against, so they aren’t tracked.
• Only fills originated by MultiCharts. An order placed manually from the TWS window (for example a manual position adjustment) has an arbitrary price that would skew the statistics: these fills are recognized and automatically excluded.
• Fill → strategy attribution at three certainty levels. When several strategies operate on the same symbol, QANTHOS must figure out which one to attribute the fill to. It does so in order of reliability: (1) certain, if the order identifier passed by MultiCharts uniquely matches a candidate strategy; (2) certain by exclusion, if there’s only one possible candidate on that symbol and direction; (3) probable, when several candidates remain and the identifier isn’t enough to decide — in that case the strategy whose theoretical price is closest to the fill’s price is chosen, and the attribution is logged as “probable”, never passed off as certain.
• The point value comes from the Tools tab. To convert the price difference into dollars, QANTHOS uses the point value of the actually traded contract (the Traded On field in the instrument sheet). If that’s missing or invalid, that fill’s slippage isn’t recorded — and a warning flags it in the panel — rather than computing a number on an unknown basis.

The sign follows the trader’s intuitive logic: for a buy, it’s unfavourable if the IB fill occurs at a higher price than the theoretical one (you paid more); for a sell, it’s unfavourable if the fill occurs at a lower price (you received less). The opposite case is favourable slippage — it happens, and is tracked just the same.

7.2 The compact panel and the full dialog

In the IB Reconciliation box, below the two MC/IB position tables, a dedicated strip shows three real-time summary numbers: the number of tracked trades, the average slippage in points (coloured green if favourable on average, red if unfavourable) and the accumulated total in dollars. At the bottom of this strip, in the box’s bottom-right, an icon button (bar chart) opens the full Slippage History dialog.

The dialog opens as a non-modal window (you can keep it open while working elsewhere) and offers two filters at the top: Symbol (all, or a specific one) and Period (last 7, 30, 90 days, or full history). Below the filters, a panel of five statistics summarizes the selected period: total trades, average slippage in points, total slippage in dollars, favourable percentage and maximum unfavourable recorded.

7.3 The four views: Detail and the three aggregations

The dialog’s body is organized into four sub-tabs:

The three aggregated views share the same columns — N trades, avg pt, avg $, slippage $/contract, total $, % favourable, max unfavourable pt — and are sorted by ascending Total $: the most costly groups (the most negative) appear at the top, so the most serious problems jump out immediately.

The “slippage $/contract” column is the right lens for comparing different instruments. The dollar total also depends on how many contracts you traded: an instrument with many more executions will always look “more costly” in total. Normalizing per contract gives an honest comparison between tickers and strategies with very different volumes — exactly what you need to understand where slippage is really biting your edge.

7.4 Persistent history, export and import

The history is persistent: it survives closing and reopening QANTHOS (up to the 1000 most recent records saved to disk). From the dialog’s top bar you can:

• Export to Excel (4-sheet .xlsx: Detail + the three aggregations), useful for periodically archiving the history or analyzing it elsewhere;
• Import a previously exported file, in Merge mode (adds only records not already present, with automatic deduplication) or Replace mode (replaces everything, with explicit confirmation);
• Clear the history — destructive action, requires confirmation.

7.5 Why it’s worth checking regularly

Slippage tracking connects directly to two levers you’ve already met elsewhere in QANTHOS, and it’s worth keeping them in mind together:

• Min Avg Trade (Tools tab). That threshold establishes how much a trade must earn on average for it to be worth trading. If average slippage per contract on a ticker eats up a substantial part of that margin, the threshold you set is more optimistic than reality — and this panel is how you notice it with numbers, not a hunch.
• Safety Margin (Money Management). The prudential multiplier applied to the worst-trade estimate also exists to absorb surprises like systematic slippage. A history showing persistent unfavourable slippage on a ticker is a concrete argument for keeping that margin higher — or for reviewing how and when that strategy is executed.

Checking it periodically — not just when something seems to be going wrong — is what lets you catch an execution problem in time, before it silently erodes months of real edge.

8. Macro events

Monitoring integrates monitoring of the day’s macroeconomic events and their historical impact on the portfolio’s strategies. Found in two forms:

• A mini-summary at the top (calendar icon): how many adverse and favourable events today, and the next critical event.
• The full panel in the Macro Events sub-tab, with per-event and per-strategy detail.
• The table’s Macro column, which marks strategies touched today with a dot (red/green/orange) and describes the impact in a tooltip (how many historical trades on those events, win rate, deviation).

The idea is to give you context: if an important macro release is imminent and touches strategies that historically suffer from it, you know beforehand, not after.

9. Exposure and today’s alerts

The tab’s bottom strip pairs two panels:

• Today’s alerts — a summary of active alerts (starting with macro ones), normalized by severity.
• Exposure — two pie charts showing the live portfolio’s composition by ticker and by asset class. An instant read on where gross exposure is concentrated.

10. Notifications and Telegram

Monitoring can alert you in real time, on your PC and on Telegram. Notifications cover, among others, a strategy’s activation/deactivation, portfolio misalignments, reaching daily stop or take-profit, rollovers, new and closed trades, market session (CME/NYMEX) opening/closing. Critical alerts can’t be silenced. Each type can be enabled or disabled in settings.

On Telegram, besides notifications, a bot with commands is available (for example to ask for P&L and portfolio status) and a natural-language assistant: before answering, the assistant re-reads the live portfolio’s current status, so answers are up to date — useful when you’re away from your PC. A macro agenda can send you a morning briefing and pre-event warnings.

For daily P&L, stop/TP and positions, the Telegram functions read data already present in the tab (IB for P&L, reports for trades): none of these functions send orders.

Daily stop and TP. If you set daily stop or take-profit thresholds, Monitoring warns you as P&L approaches them (warning) and when it reaches them (trigger). They remain alerts: the operational decision is yours.

11. Settings

The Settings button opens a dialog with dedicated sections:

• General / Log — MultiCharts reports folder, update intervals, status thresholds, and the session log.
• Interactive Brokers — IB/TWS host, port and auto-connect.
• Telegram — token and chat, enablement, briefing times and pre-event window.

Settings persist across sessions. Notes column annotations are also saved.

12. Common issues and notes

The tab says “no live portfolio”. Monitoring only watches the portfolio marked live. Go to the Builder, build/select the operational portfolio and press Mark as live.

The MC column is all grey / I don’t see MultiCharts sizes. The report folder is missing from settings, or the trading software’s export component isn’t recent enough to provide status (and size). Configure the folder and check the export.

A row is red: “Live on MC, not in portfolio”. A strategy is running on MultiCharts that the live portfolio doesn’t call for: unplanned exposure to manage on your software.

The size is red. Contracts on MultiCharts don’t match those assigned by QANTHOS: the tooltip shows both and the difference.

Max Margin with ⚠️. Margin data is missing for one or more tickers (not present in the instrument database): the shown value is an underestimate, not complete data. Fill in the data in the Tools tab.

IB won’t connect. Check host/port in settings and that TWS/IB Gateway is listening. Remember: the integration only reads open positions, it never sends orders.

A fill doesn’t show up in the slippage history. Could be a position close (untracked, no reference theoretical price), an order placed manually in TWS (deliberately excluded), or a missing or invalid point value for that ticker in the Tools tab — in the latter case the panel shows an explicit warning.

Average slippage is consistently unfavourable on a ticker. Worth cross-checking against that ticker’s Min Avg Trade (Tools tab): if per-contract slippage absorbs a significant share of it, the set tradability threshold might be more optimistic than operational reality.

13. An example workflow

A typical path, not a prescription.

1. In the Builder, mark the operational portfolio live.
2. In Monitoring, open Settings and point it to the report folder (and IB and Telegram, if applicable).
3. Press Start.
4. Check the counters and the ● MC indicator: all portfolio strategies should show as aligned.
5. Scan the table: no red (orphan) rows and no orange St (missing on MC); green Sizes.
6. Keep an eye on the rotation P&L and today’s macro alerts; use Notes to annotate.
7. Regularly check the slippage history from the IB Reconciliation box: spot tickers or strategies where real execution systematically deviates from the theoretical price.
8. Leave notifications on (and Telegram, if you want alerts away from your PC) and act on your trading software when Monitoring flags a misalignment.

Monitoring makes the gap between the plan and reality visible. It doesn’t act in your place: it puts in front of you what you need to act with awareness, leaving every broker action under your control.

14. To learn more

• Live Portfolio — how to mark a portfolio live: this tab’s single source.
• Tools — tickers, sessions, rescaling factors, margin data and point value (used to convert slippage into dollars) used here.
• Money Management — the sizes the table compares against MultiCharts.
• Equity — the historical result of the portfolio you’re monitoring.