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I thought a summary of some comments and opinions from someone who knows the
real time data feed industry might be useful to the group for information
and discussion. The person would rather remain anonymous, so please don't
ask who it is.
__________________________
First off every "broadcast" system is going to fall by the way side. BMI,
DTN, Signal, COMSTOCK Sat feed, Pc Quote hyper feed,
Reasons being
1- Decimalization of Nasdaq stocks
2- Nasdaq plans to allow ½ cent bids
3- Globalization of all markets. Meaning you will soon be able to trade
100 plus world exchanges using real time. For example look at the DBCC and
London Times merger. This gives DBCC real time contracts with 140 exchanges
4- Cost. For example a sat system uses a technology called FM cubed.
This I am told means for every 56k you need a new crystal in the receiver
and a new node on the KU band Sat system. Also the output must be combined
and pushed through a serial port. Not very efficient
5- Cable. No cable company wants to supply more than 4 vbi lines
In short no bandwidth to grow the data content. Also scans will be done on a
server at the data provider.
_________________________
This person's conclusion is that even though there are problems to be solved
with internet feeds, they will be much more reliable than satellite feeds in
terms of accuracy and timeliness. Mainly because it is "narrowcast" instead
of broadcast. For example, with a BMI or Signal or DTN satellite feed, if
you are trading the S&P, you get everything the vendor has (all stocks,
options, commodities, etc.), broadcast to your receiver box, where it is
then filtered to just send the S&P on to your PC. With an internet feed, the
server can send you just what you specifically want, so, for example, your
whole internet bandwidth can be dedicated to the S&P and a few other symbols
of interest.
Quite a compelling argument. Now I just have to feel good about everything
on the net being stable between the data server source and my PC.
I would like to hear other people's opinions on these issues. I would
especially like to hear more about what satellite or internet feeds have
worked the best with TS2Ki.
My TS4 just got hosed overnight. I am on hold right now with Omega. I am
getting a "Bad Time Received (8/05/2079)" error message. I already checked
with DBC about my BMI feed. Everything is fine on the box. It is like it
happened going from 2/29 to 3/1. My data yesterday (2/29/2000) was fine all
day. Sometime during the night, things went bad.
So, because of this, and because of some positive comments about TS2Ki SP4C,
I thought I would take another look at it. BMI satellite has been a great
feed for me for 4 years with TS4, although I do not like the price.
I am not considering BMI satellite for TS2Ki, though. Someone I know tested
their BMI satellite feeding TS2Ki and TS4. BMI feeding TS4 processed 50%
more ticks that BMI feeding TS2Ki! The explanation I received from Omega was
that BMI added some middleware called the Data Manager, which is the
bottleneck, apparently. One thing that could change my mind about BMI
satellite is if they fixed the Data Manager and went to futures data only.
Then they could be one of the fastest services.
The two feeds I have heard the best comments about are DTN satellite and
PCQuotes internet. With the comments from my associate about the impending
problems with broadcast, I am thinking that PCQuote may be the best.
What are your thoughts? What about eSignal?
Neil
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