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At 2:57 PM -0500 3/28/02, Melody Blais wrote:
>An open letter from Bill and Ralph Cruz has just been posted addressing
>numerous changes in our business policy and pricing based on user requests.
>I thought you might like to see it.
Assuming they are serious about again becoming a supplier of trading
software, (albeit connected to a real-time data feed), what features
do the members of this list think that the company would have to add
to TradeStation 6 to allow it to TOTALLY REPLACE TS2000i and TS4.0?
The letter says, "you've spoken and we've listened". Maybe they will
listen again...
Here is my list below. I have TradeStation 4.0 and TradeStation
2000i but not TradeStation 6 so some of these items may already be in
the product. I would like nothing better than being able to retire
these old products and move to a better version...
Please post your ideas as well while they seem to be in a "listening
mood".
Bob Fulks
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Bad Ticks
Bad ticks happen - that is a fact of life. They can have bad-tick
filters to improve things but we will still get some. It is
unrealistic to assume that their staff can fix all of them promptly
so it seems necessary to allow the user to correct or delete bad
ticks locally on their systems as we can with TS2000i.
Historical Data Resolution
They now provide historical data with resolution down to 1-minute
bars. (They supply 1-tick bars but only very little data - far too
little for meaningful backtesting.) 1-minute bars are simply too
course for trading today. Many symbols have several hundred ticks per
minute and waiting a full minute for a new bar seems like an eternity
now days. We certainly do not need the 40,000 bars per day of a
1-tick chart for backtesting but we do need something better than
1-minute resolution. I think 0.1-minute (6 second) resolution would
be OK (although 1 second would be better).
Using 0.1-minute resolution would require only 4000 bars in a day for
high volume symbols such as ES or CSCO (instead of the present 400
one-minute bars or 40,000 tick-bars). I would think there could be
some compression algorithm that would make this more efficient for
storage and transmission.
The extension of the EasyLanguage statements could be pretty simple
using one place after the decimal:
if Time = 1203.2 then ....
The precision of TradeStation could handle this. Having 0.1-minute
resolution would pretty much eliminate the need for having a lot of
1-tick data for backtesting.
Ability to Use Existing Data
We all have lots of existing data - going far back in time. We need
to be able to use that data for backtesting. The ability to load OMZ
and XPO files into a chart (even if they are not stored in a server)
would be a great convenience. ASCII might be OK but it is pretty
verbose. Alternately, they could supply extensive, accurate,
historical data down to 0.1 minute resolution but it seems
unrealistic that they would ever have all the data we need.
Reliability of Internet Feeds
I have been using DynaStore with QFeed for several months now and
QFeed is barely reliable enough day-in and day-out for trading
real-time. The Internet mechanism still has lots of possibilities for
missing or delayed data. Severe Internet congestion can delay packets
for as much as a minute or two.
I previously used BMI. I have friends that use DTN satellite. These
are rock solid because the broadcast mechanism is fundamentally more
reliable than the Internet. A winning combination would be historical
data-on-demand for loading a chart, as they do now, plus satellite
data to update the charts on a tick-by-tick basis.
Incompatibilities with Previous Versions
Users report that programs that work in TS2000i work differently in
Version 6. (Missing divide-by-zero checks in internal function
libraries, different command syntax, functions re-written such that
they now do not work correctly if you change inputs such as "Length"
from bar to bar, etc.)
They should make Version 6 upward compatible with version 5 and
Version 4 programs to simplify the migration of the present
customers. Obviously, if it is hard to migrate or TradeStation 6 is
missing features of TS2000i and TS4.0, users would need both
TradeStation 6 and an older version for research. Then, we have to
ask ourselves, "Is having on-line data worth the trouble of having
two different versions of the platform?"
Second Copies
Most of us have one workstation for trading and one or more for
development. I originally bought two copies of TradeStation 4.0 for
this purpose. I do not know their policy for this but some reasonable
price for a development station (using intraday data but not
requiring real-time data) would be needed.
I understand that the new "research version" only works on
"end-of-day data". That will not do it. It has to also allow
intraday data - even ASCII might be OK (but there ought to be
some more compressed format such "real" zipped ASCII.)
Quality
As we all know, many of the customers have never moved from Version 4
to TS2000i. The main reason was the issue of quality. There are
just too many defects in their software!
It took until build 16 for TradeStation 4.0 to be usable, It took
until about Service pack 4 until TradeStation 2000i was usable. I
understand that Version 6 is finally becoming usable.
In a prior life, I was a VP of Engineering of a major software
company supervising several hundred software engineers around the
world. I know that developing quality software is no longer an art
but requires very well developed processes and modern development
tools. Their software development processes need major improvements!
There is no excuse for such poor quality today. It has been proven
over and over that high quality software saves much more in support
costs that it costs to produce. And now that customers are using the
software in real time to trade, the potential liabilities of paying
damages for customers losses due to bugs should make the tradeoff
obvious. This has to become a major priority!
Summary
I do not have Version 6 so this list is compiled from comments by
people who have tried it. As I said, the information may not be
up-to-date. But if they are serious about migrating all of their
customers and keeping the software licensing fees coming in, then
it seems clear that there is still a ways to go...
Bob Fulks
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