If you want a Tradestation/ Easylanguage clone with IB datafeed and backfill support, look at Multichart from www.tssupport.com
We are supporting IB as a Broker for automated order routing, including automatic synchronisation and good solutions for the fill problems. You can also directly use IB account access (direct order or query market position) from within a stragety or indicator by programming. What we do not offer is IB as datafeed. Such a solution is not professional - this is our true opinion. You need a professionally managed backfill with quality data. Using IB here with dubious backfill sources or home-made tick collection is a high risk, you won't save money - you will lose it. Our choice for US datasource is clearly eSignal. (Of course you can use additional history data for long backtesting)
IB get the data directly from the exchanges and are not using the quote vendor feed but the full, actual trades feed. Many people will tell you that the IB feed is more reliable than esignal.
That was funny . You call IBs data not professional, but offer "professional" feeds like Taipan (I doubt there is one professional trader out there using it). Have you ever compared some of the major US feeds to IB? Do it first, before writing things like this in a forum.
I second that. When they have implemented the backtesting features, they will be way ahead TS (the already are when it comes to charting).
The issue is quite likely that IB's feed is free for number of exchanges and low cost on others and they don't offer cuts of their data fees to third party software vendors.
clearly u haven't got a clue what u are talkin' about: for your own info IB data is extremely reliable, not like ensign or esignal where quotes lag or freeze; I myself and many other NEVER EVER had a problem with crappy backfill and bad ticks. Many traders in this board and elsewhere divorced from the above mentioned data providers because the data was awful and guess what...they said that they were wishing third party software was as reliable as IB.
I am very sorry, that you must have misunderstood what I meant. The lack of backfill data, makes using IB as a feed for technical analysis with backtesting very questionable. The realtime feed is solid like a rock. I am an IB customer by myself and I have a 3000 xTra and Bloomberg running for comparison. But please bear in mind that only a minority is technically capable of handling a tick server by themself. We have to find a solution that is useable for all customers. It would be brilliant if IB extends there backfill data even further. Generally speaking a forum is a difficult platform for discussing such things. Browsing the forums here seems that there are a lot of companies here, who post messages under nicknames with their personal interest. I have decided to stop posting here from now on. But I appreciate your comment about an eSignal latency problem. I also understand that IB is very much wanted as a data feed. We will investigate that and use the results for our strategic planning. Thank you very much. TradeSignal 5 is launched on the INVEST 2006 in Stuttgart. Looking forward to seeing you there