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At the start of the year, I posted a message to the board, asking for
people's experiences with using DTN IQFeed:
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/amibroker/message/92663
Several people replied, and the general concensus was that eSignal was
faster and more reliable. One of the responses was from Jay at DTN,
where he stated how the deficiences were being addressed, and that the
quality of service would improve.
I've been using their service for two months. Here is the summary of
their service and how it compares with eSignal's.
Customer Service: DTN's is much better. I initially had several email
exchanges with respect to getting DDE working with Excel, and one of
their customer representatives even wrote a macro to automate the
whole update process.
DDE/Excel: Thanks to DTN's helps with getting this working, updating
prices in RT into Excel works much better than with eSignal.
Symbols: For the yearly fee, the symbol limit is about 1000, versus
200 for the standard eSignal service. This also includes RT options,
and, I believe, futures, both of which cost extra with eSignal.
Price: With this higher symbol limit, the price is just over half that
of eSignal. In theory, good value for money!
Data Speed: Symbol updating is visibly slow, when more than about 2
days of data have to be backfilled.
Backfilling: Backfills for a newly-entered symbol can take about 20
seconds, compared to about 2-3 seconds with eSignal. Worse, sometimes
the backfill blocks, and the symbols has to be erased and reentered,
or Amibroker has to be stopped and restarted. Further, only 80 days of
intraday backfill are available, versus 90 days intraday plus a
further 9 months EOD, from eSignal. This is the worst aspect of DTN's
service.
Support: DTN have been claiming since I joined that these issues were
being sorted out, and they led me to believe that they would be solved
in the next release of Amibroker, when that arrives.
I recently sent the following email to Tomasz at AB:
"I've been using DTN.IQ real-time data feed, and in general,
it seems to work well.
"I was previously using eSignal, and I find that prices using
DTN.IQ data are updated much slower than with eSignal, but I
understand from DTN that this problem should be solved with
the next version of Amibroker. But another problem I've found
is that sometimes, when running an exploration on the tickers
in a watchlist, it simply hangs up when trying to backfill a
stock ticker. The ticker on which it blocks seems to vary
between exploration runs, even when the runs are separated by only
a few minutes.
"To fix the problem, I have to close and restart Amibroker,
and the previously blocked backfill updates successfully, and
either:
- the exploration successfully completes, or
- the backfill fails, either on a later ticker in the watchlist,
or on an earlier ticker in the watchlist that had successfully
backfilled during the previous run
"Other things I've noticed:
- There is only 80 days of backfill intraday data. With eSignal
there was 90 days intraday data plus one year (I think) of
EOD data. DTN told me that this problem should be fixed in
the next Amibroker version"
I received this reponse from Tomasz:
"1. The slowness of IQFeed can not be "solved" by next version
of AmiBroker. It must be solved by IQFEED. This is IQFEED which
is slow, not AB. Notice that other sources (eSignal, IB) work
faster.
"2. All other problems you are having are because of problems
in IQFeed Client software that is delivered by IQFeed. I told
them about this hundreds of times. They always say that 'they
are working on this'.
"If you want stable and solid feed use Signal."
I am using the most recent official versions of all software:
- Amibroker v4.70.5
- DTN.IQ data plugin v1.60
- IQLink v4.1.1.1
So, there you have it, DTN's frills are better, but eSignal provide a
better data feed. I suppose it's a question of getting what you pay for.
I hope this helps other people who may be thinking of switching over.
Paul
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