On this page
Compass is built to be left alone. Most of what follows is one double-click each, done once, and then never thought about again.
There are two kinds of record underneath everything you see, and the whole of this page comes down to the difference between them.
The nightly record is open interest: how many contracts are standing at each strike, which settles once a day after the close. If a day is ever missing, it can be fetched back.
The tape is Compass's own record of price, sampled every thirty seconds while it is running. The Drive, the Logbook and the level record are all built from it. If a session was never watched, it is gone. Rebuilding it afterwards would produce something that looks like an observation while being a reconstruction, so Compass leaves the gap where it is.
So: the nightly record forgives you. The tape does not. Everything below follows from that.
1. Turn on the morning recorder. One double-click, once.
In your Compass folder, run Install Recorder Service (Windows) or Install Recorder Task (Mac, or Windows when the first one balks).
It registers a job that starts at 06:20 Pacific every trading day, starts the data terminal on its own, records from the opening bell to the close, and exits. On weekends and holidays it notices the market is shut and exits straight away.
The recorder can keep going when you log off. That is what Install Recorder Service does differently. Windows normally ends everything you were running the moment you sign out, so a recorder started under your account stops with it and the rest of that session is gone. The service version runs under the machine rather than under you, so the day's tape survives you signing out.
It will ask for administrator permission. Choose Yes. Registering a job that runs under the machine needs it. If you decline, everything stays exactly as it was and whatever you had before keeps running.
Two things it needs to find first, both of which you already have if Compass is working: your ThetaData creds.txt and the ThetaData terminal file. It looks in the usual places, including a Desktop that has been moved into OneDrive, which is where most people's is. If one of them is missing it stops, leaves everything as it was, and prints every folder it looked in. It either finishes or leaves no trace.
On its own, Compass records for exactly as long as you have it open. An hour of Compass is an hour of tape, permanently. With it, you get whole sessions whether you are at the desk or away.
It prints what it did. Read those lines once:
Runs as: SYSTEM
Wakes the machine: True
Runs late if missed: True
Tries again: every 30 minutes for 7 hours, if nothing is recording
Also starts: two minutes after the machine boots
"Runs as: SYSTEM" is the line that matters, and it is the whole point. It means the job belongs to the machine rather than to your login, which is what lets it survive you signing out. It writes into your own Compass folder, where you can see it: the installer works that path out while running as you and hands it to the job in writing.
If that line says your own name instead, the task installed in place of the service and you are on the old behaviour. Everything works, with one limit: the recorder stops when you sign out.
What those lines mean in practice:
| where your machine is at 06:20 | what happens |
|---|---|
| awake | records the whole session |
| a desktop, asleep | wakes itself, records the whole session |
| a laptop asleep, plugged in | wakes itself, records the whole session |
| a laptop asleep, on battery | records from whenever you next open it |
| fully shut down | records from whenever you switch it on |
| signed out, machine still on | keeps recording, with Install Recorder Service |
And if something stops it mid-session, it starts again. Every half hour until early afternoon the job checks, and starts the recorder if the tape has stopped. A check that finds a recording already running leaves it alone. It also starts when you log in, for the morning you switch the machine on late.
The battery row is Windows rather than Compass. Windows switches off wake timers on battery by default, and that setting sits above any scheduled job. We leave it alone on purpose: waking a sleeping laptop in a bag to run a six hour recording would drain it flat.
So the one habit worth having: sleep the machine rather than shutting it down, and if it is a laptop, leave it on the charger. That is the entire trick.
2. Let it bank, and stop worrying about the nights you missed
Compass records open interest in the background any time it is open, for your own names: the symbols you hold, the levels you watch, and the indices.
If nights are missing, the room tells you. Open the Telescope on a name and look near the bottom. If a stretch is missing from the archive you will see a fold reading something like 6 MORNINGS NOT BANKED, with the dates and an offer to fill them.
Open it, tick Every name this machine banks, and press the button. It reaches back as far as 250 sessions and skips every day already on file, so stopping halfway and running it again later is free.
It runs on your own data subscription, on your machine, and writes to your own archive. It stays on your computer, and it stays yours.
On a name whose record is already complete the fold reads FILL THE RECORD instead. Same button, same panel. You can start from any name.
3. Back up the archive. This is the one that cannot be undone.
Run Back Up My Archive, then Turn On The Backup, once each.
Your open interest can be refetched. Your tape and your poses live in exactly one place, on your machine, and a failed drive takes them with it. This is five seconds of work against a permanent loss.
If you have run a backup before and seen it report a failure, that was us, and it is fixed. Compass keeps a small lock file open while the bot or the recorder is running, and the backup stalled on a file something else was holding. It gave up on that one file and reported the whole run as failed, while every file that mattered had copied perfectly. It now steps over lock files, which belong outside a backup anyway: a restored one would tell Compass another copy was already running.
4. Let Compass handle the data terminal
Compass starts the ThetaData terminal itself, without a window, and stops it again when you exit. Leave that to Compass.
Only one terminal may be signed in to an account at a time. A second one collides with the first, shuts itself down, and leaves the first unusable. The symptom is a connection screen reporting the terminal unreachable while it looks like it is running.
If you ever see that screen, read the headline. It names the cause and gives you the steps for that cause specifically. Every route it offers leads somewhere.
Always leave Compass through Exit in the small TRT Compass window rather than closing the browser tab. Exit stops the terminal and the recorder cleanly. Closing the tab leaves them running.
5. When Compass feels slow, check the browser first
Compass itself is small. The part doing the work uses a few hundred megabytes, which is less than most single applications on your machine.
But it lives in a browser tab, so a full browser is where slowness comes from. A browser holding dozens of tabs can be using several gigabytes, and once the machine runs short of memory everything gets a beat slower at once: typing, scrolling, other applications, and Compass along with them.
The test that tells you in ten seconds: open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc on Windows, Activity Monitor on Mac) and look at the Memory figure at the top.
- Under about 70%: memory is fine, so tell us what you are seeing and we will look.
- Above about 80%: the machine is full. Close your browser completely and reopen it. Restore only the tabs you are actually using.
That one step gives back more than anything else you can do, and it takes no restart.
Two more worth knowing:
- Give Compass its own window rather than a tab in a pile of thirty. It repaints often during the session and a browser under pressure serves it last.
- When the market is shut, Compass slows itself down and redraws far less often. If it feels heavy in the evening, look at the browser.
6. The short version
Once, and never again:
- Install Recorder Service, and check it prints Runs as: SYSTEM
- Back Up My Archive, then Turn On The Backup
Then, as a habit:
- On the charger overnight if you want tomorrow's whole session
- Leave through Exit rather than closing the tab
- If a room reports unbanked mornings, press the button
- If everything feels slow, close the browser and reopen it
Everything else Compass does for itself.
Everything on this page describes the current build.
This guide is the product's own, published as members read it. All guides · The Legend