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I've been wondering what the big appeal of the internet offerings as well. Having used
S&P Comstock's interface for a while, one reason internet broadcasting is appealing is
that the application on your computer transmits to the vendor what symbol(s) are needed,
the interval, and the days of history specified by the application you are running. The
vendor's server sends back ONLY the information you are monitoring.
The vendor maintains the history of symbols, symbol set-up, exchange changes. Therefore
if
someone wanted to display a 5 minute intra-day chart for CPQ for 15 days, the vendor's
server would transmit precisely that data. Then the vendors server would transmit tick
by tick for that symbol(s). The amount of information transmitted continuously by the
vendor's server is tiny by today's internet standards. There is virtually no setup
required by a user other that what indicators they want etc.
The first problem is the vendor decides how much history to maintain - both daily and
intraday ticks, and you have no control over the data quality. Typically the vendor
maintains about 20 days of tick data - which is trivial compared to what many of us have
saved in
T/S.
The second problem is the internet can be delayed by a couple of seconds easily, as you
pointed out, so BMI satellite or cable will be at least as fast as the internet and most
likely much faster.
The third problem is you are restricted to the vendor's application to run on your
computer. A while ago both S&P Comtstock and PCQuote used Townsend's Analytic's TAL,
which is a trivial application compared to TradeStation.
Overall, given the cost of the internet service is often quite high, cable or satellite is
VASTLY superior. However a Server like T/S's requires considerably more database
maintenance - adding new symbols, changing symbol parameters etc.
--- Chris
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Osborn <jimo@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx <omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wednesday, December 23, 1998 9:53 PM
Subject: Viability of Internet RT feed
>was: Re: WOW Internet Trader 7.0
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