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On Wednesday, January 27, 1999 11:31 AM dpowell@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>I day-trade the S&P using BMI cable. It is 6-8 second delay as was
>DBC. Also, I get NASDAQ stocks real-time and would have to spend at
>least an hour per day, per stock deleting bad ticks. Therefore it's
>useless. I can't wait to have either DTN or PC Quotes as an option.
I utilize the BMI satellite feed and what you indicate about bad ticks was
true prior to December 1998 when BMI replaced a third party vendor with
their own datafeed. As far as I can see so far the response time has
improved significantly and the data is very clean. There still are some
minor systemic problems but those are being eliminated. I have the 4.0
Quote Server Quote Collection Template set to automatically add stock
symbols and previous to December I found that sometimes more invalid than
valid symbols were being added. I even wrote a program to detect and delete
the 'garbage' symbols. After Galaxy 4 went out of commission the problem
worsened and I increased the size of my satellite dish without much effect.
However, on the very first day of operation of the new datafeed the
'garbage' symbols vanished. I since have discovered that if the 4.0 quote
server been implemented with the full amount of error checking that the BMI
datafeed information contains, the invalid data would have been properly
rejected.
Much has been discussed about the inability of the Omega Research 4.0 quote
server to handle lowercase (the CPQ/CpQ problem). Another problem occurs
because the 4.0 quote server does not handle price denominators in excess of
100,000 properly and BMI is using values as high as 100,000,000 (a valid
number per the BMI spec) on 200 - 300 bulletin board stocks (BOSTQ-BB is a
good example). Hopefully, BMI will take pity on us and reduce the maximum
transmitted price denominator to a value that the quote server can properly
handle.
The bottom line is that many of the problems that appear to be 'BMI' related
are in actuality Omega Research related. If you are still getting large
numbers of bad data ticks since the December changeover, maybe it is a cable
problem and not a BMI problem.
Bob Scott
rlscott@xxxxxxxx
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