|
PureBytes Links
Trading Reference Links
|
Well written letter. Hope you get a rational response.
Kind of makes you wonder about product liability. A product sold for the
express purpose of trading is unable to protect the user from common
occurrences (not unforeseen acts of nature). Is there product liability
if the user then suffers losses as a result of the poor engineering of
the product? In many other areas, the manufacturer would be at great
risk (aircraft manufacturers, etc.).
Just a thought.
Allan
____________________________________________
IUhrik wrote:
>
> Dear Bill,
>
> The following is an E-mail copy of a letter that I am sending to you for
> the record by Certified mail:
>
> Mr. Bill Cruz, President
> Omega Research, Inc.
> 9200 Sunset Drive
> Miami, Fl 33173
>
> January 13, 1998
>
> By Certified Mail/Return Receipt Requested
>
> Subject: Bad tick editing
>
> Dear Bill:
>
> On several occasions in the past two years I have communicated to
> you and your associates my concerns about TradeStation's ability
> to save and display the real-time data in a reliable and usable way.
>
> After TradeStation had been enabled with the capability to edit bad
> ticks for symbols generating up to 33,000 ticks a day, two major
> problems have remained:
>
> (1) The inability to handle a seriously bad tick, received between
> midnight and the start of a trading session. When TS receives a
> tick like that, it alters the value of all subsequent ticks. What that
> means is that a minor datafeed or reception problem, manifested
> in a couple of extraneouos bits of data, may render Omega users'
> data practically worthless. I do not want to contemplate what would
> happen in case of a major datafeed problem.
>
> As your own refresh data show, no one is immune to such data
> destruction. Among the symbols I follow, I found eight such cases
> over the past 30 days on your Web site. For instance, on Jan 5,
> in addition to INTC and SPX, two more symbols were corrupted by
> a bad initial tick -- Cigna (CI) and Weyerhauser (WY). Kellog's
> data (K) were destroyed on Jan 2. Delta (DAL) and Burlington
> Northern (BNI) were hit on Dec 31, and Cigna (CI) on Dec 11.
>
> At present, the only way to restore the corrupted data is to do it
> manually. However, that takes an enormous amount of time, so, for
> practical purposes, it is not feasible.
>
> (2) The inability edit bad ticks for stocks that generate more than
> 33,000 ticks a day. The consequences of such a tick occuring are
> also severe -- an uneditable bad tick way out of range makes Omega
> user's data useless. Also, each time editing of such tick is attempted,
> the computer crashes, interrupting data reception and market
> monitoring in real-time.
>
> Now that Oracle was hit in this fashion in October, the question is
> how often that will happen to other stocks.
>
> As the trend in the growing volume of ticks indicates, many more
> data collections will be destroyed. Look at what has happened to the
> level of 13,000 ticks per day. A year ago that barrier seemed
> unreachable. Now, however, the 13K days are commonplace. My
> records show the following incidence of crossing the 13,000 tick
> threshold by major stocks between May 5 and December 31:
>
> AAPL - 3, AMAT - 18, ASND - 20, AMGN - 2, BA - 1,
> COMS - 16, CPQ - 4, CSCO - 13, DELL - 32, INTC - 90,
> MSFT - 14, NOVL - 1, NKE - 1, OXHP - 4, ORCL - 6,
> SUNW - 5, WCOM - 3.
>
> Given these trends, one can assume that the above stocks could be
> crossing the uneditable 33K barrier with similar frequency within
> a few months. As a result, they might become unsuable for stock
> and option trading.
>
> When this happens, will Omega continue to recommend its clients
> to delete the days affected like it did recently in Oracle's case?
> Would your company really have the gall to suggest to your clients
> to delete 90 days of data for INTC -- or 32 days of data for DELL --
> just because your products have an insufficient tick editing capability?
>
> It should be obvious that without the full capability to edit bad ticks
> and TS-corrupted data, Omega products such as TradeStation,
> SuperCharts and OptionStation can not be considered functional for
> stock and option traders. Using them may cause a loss of data,
> render the existing data unusable for an extended period of time,
> and generate erroneous signals.
>
> I have heard that the editing problem would be resolved in a new
> generation of Omega's products such as TradeStation 5. That,
> certainly, is the good news. However, what about the products you
> are selling today, such as the existing version 4? These products
> may be unsuable tomorrow, not because of natural obsolesence,
> but because of a known software defect. Therefore, the issue of
> bad tick editing should be resolved now.
>
> One possible solution, suggested by Mr. Rodney Grisham, is to
> offer a simple utility that would allow Omega's clients to decompress
> and edit the tick data externally. I am sure other alternatives are
> available. For instance, you might decide to keep the omz
> compression algorithm for the EL functions, while switching to a
> publicly available compression method -- such as PKzip -- for the
> data files.
>
> At any rate, something has to be done. This is a serious problem
> that will not go away. So, I urge you again: Please correct it so that
> TradeStation -- a fine program for future traders -- can become
> a fine program also for those who follow stocks and options.
>
> I wish you and everyone else at Omega a healthy and prosperous
> year ahead.
>
> Sincerely yours,
>
> Igor Uhrik
|