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Steve Karnish wrote:
>For the last seven months I've been downloading futures prices
>from Prophet Data (http://www.prophetdata.com/). $19.95/month
>gets you updates on multiple contracts of 35 different
>commodities. For an extra $5, you get perceptual contract
>updates. The prices are available around !:30 PDT and are
>easily downloaded from the above site. Customer service is a
>bit slow to respond (the trend in the software industry), but
>I've found the whole process to be fairly clean. Anyone who is
>receiving cheaper data and are "in love" with their data
>provider, please "chirp" up. I can be had for cheaper and
>better.
For commodities I use CSI's "Unfair Advantage". There is a one time set up
fee (that includes data maintenance and limited charting software) of $150.
Then you can either purchase an annual data feed for about $26 a month, or pay
by the month at about $30 a month.
With this, you get all contracts from all North American commodity exchanges
on a daily basis with download from the internet, and this includes cash and
continuous contracts - which you can customize to your liking (choose roll
over dates, etc.) At set up time you also receive history data on all
commodity contracts back to 1949, or the origin of the futures contract,
whichever is earlier. This allows for extensive back testing. This compacted
data takes 42 meg of hard disk space. They support several different data
formats including MetaStock and ASCII. Their own data format is all set for
the Year 2000 - no revisions necessary. Their charting capabilities are
limited, but then that's what I have MS for. I have set up what they call
"portfolios" of MS format contracts that I track in MS, and they update those
automatically as part of the daily update process.
I am still running on a 486 PC, and my daily downloads take 20 to 30 seconds -
for all contracts in No. America. Their tech support is pretty good, and
their software has stabalized, particularly in the past 6 months. I have no
financial interest in CSI, I have just been pleased with the masses of data
they provide without gliches, and have been quite happy with their service.
They have indicated this same service will be available for stock maket
information, but for some reason have backed off of that promise.
Jim
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