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At 10:44 PM -0400 8/31/01, Gary Yakhnes wrote:
>TS2K=TS PRO + Third-Party Data Support
Your premise is an interesting one. I think it is more than just that.
I have not tried TSPro yet. (I have learned from experience that no
Omega product is worth even looking at for the first 12 to 18 months
after it's release.)
I also have concerns with their data-on-demand model, the product
quality, and the requirement to use their brokerage services..
Data-on-demand would be ideal if it really worked. No one likes
having to maintain their own data but there is now no choice if you
want lots of accurate historical data for backtesting. An ideal model
would let you collect real-time data for trading, store the data on
your machine locally, fix bad ticks as they occur, and be able to
download years of accurate historical data and store it on your
machine for system development. The ability to download intraday data
to fill holes is essential. The present combination of
DynaStore/DynaLoader plus QFeed is close to this model and works very
well.
A stock has 390 OHLC 1-minute bars in a day that would be easy to
download. Assuming 10 bytes per bar this would be 4000 bytes per day
per symbol. 100 symbols would require 400K bytes which is a few
seconds on a high speed connection. Similarly, 100 days of one symbol
would require a few seconds.
Bad ticks - I cannot see how they can avoid bad ticks screwing up the
data. When we have the data on our workstation we can at least fix a
bad tick. It is unrealistic to think they will fix them in a timely
manner for the many thousands of issues. QCharts has this problem.
The only viable model is to have the data on your machine where you
can fix any bad ticks yourself.
Server Loading - It seems fundamental that any model that requires
server capacity to do work on demand will bog down eventually. To
avoid slow performance during peak usage periods, such as when the
market opens, the capacity has to be probably ten times the average
load and management usually does not supply that kind of excess
capacity. This was a major issue with QCharts. But if you stored the
past data on your machine, the load on the servers would be very much
less and more constant. If you looked at some new symbol, you would
have to download all the data required for that new chart but these
requests would occur more randomly.
Quality Issues - I also have serious concerns about the quality of
Omega software. it seems to be getting worse with each new product.
TS4.0 is pretty good but it took them until about Build 16 until it
was even usable. TS2000i was poorer with lots of annoying bugs but by
Service Pack 5 it was usable. And TSPro ??? the trend is bad.
I have heard that they took out the divide-by-zero checks and code
that runs fine on TS2000i does not run on TSPro. The management
obviously has no appreciation for the need for quality so I wonder
whether they will ever be able to fix this. I am concerned that
software errors will cost me money in a bad trade. Building quality
software is no longer an art. The processes are now well known and
there are a lot of modern development tools to test software. There
is no excuse for shipping such buggy software today.
Brokerage Selection - TRAD seems to have the idea that people will
select their brokerage services based upon TSPro. People select a
broker based upon lots of different reasons. The user interface is
only one factor. Having a customer service person available who
answers the phone promptly, financial stability of the firm,
availability of mutual funds, etc., etc.. are all important factors
to some people. Brokerage services are rapidly becoming a commodity
and commission revenue is approaching zero. Before long, we will be
placing orders directly with the ECN's. Why anyone would want to
start a brokerage business today is beyond me. Ideally, TRAD will
work with other firms to provide a direct order entry linkage into
their order entry systems as well.
That way they would then have hundreds or thousands of salespeople
promoting their product. I would think it would be easy to establish
a more stable revenue stream based upon monthly fees for combined
TSPro/real-time data combination and fees from brokerage houses using
TSPro as a front-end for their order entry systems.
My thoughts.
Bob Fulks
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