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Vince,
It sounds like your experience with RT is seriously dated. From your
statement, I believe it would be roughly like comparing Windows 98 to
Windows 2000/XP, without the knowledge of using Windows 2000/XP. Looking at
the time-frame, I believe you probably used RT 5.x or earlier. I did
mentioned that earlier RT versions were known to be buggy (Hmm, kinda like
Windows again).
I have none of the problems you mention with the current RT, and the feed
is extremely clean, powerful, and efficient. It is not unusual to see a bad
print once a month in RT futures (compare that with eSignal, TRAD, BMI or
even CQG). I've had the opportunity with Larry Williams to compare
real-time vendors side-by-side, and I'll choose RT hands down. In terms of
capacity and load balance, I've personally stress tested RT at every tick,
every symbol, on NASDAQ and NYSE and have seen it keep up admirably on a
vanilla cable connection during peak periods ... using a 900MHz PC with 256MB.
To be fair, my direct experience of TS stops at 2000i, a product which is
also several years old. I left TS when Omega switched licensing. My current
experience comes from helping other traders setup and fix problems with TS
7.x. I do believe 7.x fixed many problems in prior releases. I still use
TS2k for testing system ideas. These days, I mostly trade with a
proprietary platform.
My experience with TerraNova is also day-and-night from yours. Perhaps in 3
years they have learned from mistakes, switched management, or just plain
learned to listen. Their support was proactive when possible (with
real-time messaging updates), and they were consistently responsive to
problem calls, if and when they occurred. TerraNova also has a terrific
education service. BTW: TerraNova produces one of the most seem-less,
real-time, online training events I've seen, combing automated call-back
phone conferences and smooth streaming full-screen PC updates ... all free
to customers. Of course, I could be running RT in the background and still
execute orders.
Since you manage a software evaluation list, I want to suggest that you
please update your evaluation, or at least make a note that the RT entry is
out-of-date. I believe that not doing so would present a disservice to
your readers.
Thanks,
Kevin
-----Original Message-----
From: Vince Heiker [mailto:tachyonv@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 8:57 PM
To: Kevin Sven Berg; omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Help choosing an online broker
Stopped using RealTick in April 2001.
RT was very buggy, especially on Monday mornings and first day after a
holiday weekend. Causes were: poor change management (old bugs reappeared);
poor testing practices - only test the patches individually, not the entire
package; etc.
Compounded by inadequate server capacity - kicked off the price quote
servers often. Poor load balancing software - use their own instead of what
is native to the server OS - and their own is buggy. Same deal for the
server side - poor change management, poor testing.
Inadequate bandwidth - frequent data feed slow downs and failures during
peak periods. Maybe compounded by the bad custom load balancing software.
Extremely arrogant support at Terra Nova.
ARCA suffers from similar problems. Fails more often than Island, Inca. Very
slow during peak periods, fails about once a month.
Terra Nova, ARCA and Townsend Analytics are inter-related. Similar senior
and IT management inadequacies.
N-o-o-o-o-o thanks, never again, for me.
FYI I have evaluated about 100 trading software packages, in depth and
detail, over the past 30 months or so. If you want a summary of the
results, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CIMTR/ and download the file -
RT just ain't that good these days, compared with often better, less
expensive alternatives.
If you are having more problems with TS 7.1 or 7.2 than you did with RT,
then its extremely likely that there is some problem other than TS7 causing
such - inadequate PC memory; inadequate processor; some hardware conflict;
some other firmware or driver conflict; use of Norton NAV; firewall issue;
exceeding max number of symbols in RadarScreen tables; etc. TS 7 has bugs,
but not even 1/100 as bad as what I experienced with the badly tested, badly
managed release of RT.
If you are using TS 2000i or TS4, I have no comment because I never used or
tried either one...had SuperCharts, hated it so much that I skipped all
Omega products until TS6/TradeStation Securities.
Vince Heiker
Flower Mound, Texas
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Sven Berg [mailto:ksberg@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 12:03 PM
To: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Help choosing an online broker
At 08:05 AM 1/21/2004 -0800, Vince Heiker wrote:
>Fix all bugs - "all" is impossible - if you think TS7 is buggy (it is
>unusually free of bugs) try RealTick for a few months.
Which version of RealTick? pre-7.x? 7.5? 7.6? 7.7? Having helped several
friends around TS7.x bugs, and used RT 7.6 on a regular basis, I'm of a much
different opinion. I see far more problems in TS. I'm curious where you find
issues. I'm aware that pre-7.x RT had it's share of problems.
At 08:05 AM 1/21/2004 -0800, Vince Heiker wrote:
>Boycott and blacklist? Likely depends upon your being objective,
>rational, accurate. Think TRAD is unreasonable, arrogant? Try Townsend
>Analytics, Terra Nova, ARCA triad of companies for a while.
Just to offer an alternate opinion, I have not found either Townsend
Analytics or TerraNova to be arrogant as suggested. In my experience,
Townsend Analytics have been far more helpful on their SDK than many other
software vendors, even with unusual, annoying, or obvious questions (like
RTFM). TerraNova has been very responsive as well, and rarely a problem.
On the other hand, I cannot say that I have been terribly impressed with
Omega Research as a company. But then again, I stopped upgrading at TS
2000i, so I cannot directly comment on their brokerage services.
Kevin
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