Maybe you could fix this PRONTO for starters: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/interest-rates/files/ICSQuote_VendorSymbols.pdf This has been disabled since November, and myself and over fifty of my clients are a bit disheartened. We made the migration over from CQG in February of 2010, and lately I am having some second thoughts about eSignal's ability to work with custom user-defined intercommodity synthetic spread combinations. I spoke with Randy over at Technical Support this afternoon about it, so please follow up with him and let's get this resolved. It seems that anything other than plain vanilla missionary position single symbol charting is a struggle with eSignal.
What spec PC do you use for esignal 11.3? I have a core duo 3.06 mhz and 4gb ram and it is a bit slow with tws and multicharts running as well. How much memnory do you need to get this running smoothly?
Version 11 is not ready for prime time. I have a 2GHz core-duo with 4GB that version 10 runs well on with TWS and two Explorers up. I have about 1600 SLOCs of code running on two symbols on one minute and one second charts, and the throughput chokes on a REALLY fast opening market for a few seconds. Otherwise it typically uses only about 30-40% of the throughput. Stay away from 11 for now (maybe years). But 10 is primo.
This is by far the worst piece of software I have seen in a long time. (BTW, I have over 20 years software development experience specializing in database internals.) With esig 10 I have 4 open windows. My main complaint is that it takes a long time to load tick based charts and is limited in memory that it can use, i.e. number of bars that can be displayed. esig 11 has improved the data loading, but that is about it. I have 1 of my 4 windows implented in 11. The efs studies I developed are without the trading dll I implented. Further, they are all designed to return null after the initial load. There are 2 es range charts, a 5 minute chart, and an add chart. Even with everything totally dumbed down, 11 regularly runs full cpu load and consumes all available memory (3.1 ghz, 16 mb). Further, it regularly crashes windows 7 once all the memory is consumed, the only program I know of that does that. You need to think of this like esig 1, it will probably need several major versions before it is really usable, at least for trading active markets like the es. I can use it on weekends and evenings to study historical range charts. The amount of data it actually loads seems a bit random as to where it cuts out, but my time template is set to 365 days and I have gotten as far back as sept. 2011. Another problem is that some of the built in studies are inaccurate, so the efs results are not consistent with esig 10. This may be because the default parameters are different, I'll have to look into that more.
I'm hoping version 11.6 will work smoothly. It should be out early 2013 according to the last word I received. I liked the speed of Qcharts when it came to loading three linked charts. ES takes a couple seconds longer.
I only demoed esignal. The interface from the old one to the new one was night and day, but for a company as large as interactive data, I expected a better platform. It just felt like a basic platform you'd get from Charles Schwab, and it looked like streetsmart edge. Ninjatrader, Multicharts are a much smaller companies and they put up decent products.
I'm still using esignal 10.6 and it's pretty solid. I run it for a month at a time 24/7 without rebooting. I don't think I would upgrade to 11 unless they offered automated trading which could be 10 years away. Runningbear