Iâm excited to announce the immediate availability of eSignal 10.4 today on the eSignal Download Page. With this comes some great features and enhancements and of special importance is the launch of a new eSignal OnDemand product directly aimed at Forex traders. ---------------------------------------------- eSignal OnDemand â Forex Weâve added two features for a new Forex version of our new eSignal OnDemand product. eSignal OnDemand â Forex allows users to choose to receive real-time data for one Forex contributor of their choice via the File -> Preferences, Forex Contributor tab. This product also has the ability to receive both delayed snapshot and real-time data at the same time. Area Charts In the past few years, the popularity of the Area Chart has grown significantly as a way to easily view general market trend. It can also be compressed into a tight space while its high contrast nature still makes the chart easily readable. The 4 choices of area chart styles mostly have to do with color choices. The default, single-gradient color is one color that lightens / darkens to highlight the peaks of a trend. A second choice is the multiple-gradient chart, for which you can choose more than one color (seen to the right). Thereâs also a single-color choice, as well as a new histogram style chart. Enhanced Hibernation Previously, in eSignal 10.3, symbols that were hibernating were completely unsubscribed from receiving any updates from our servers and a âHibernatedâ message was displayed in the Quote Window. There is now a new color scheme for symbols that are in hibernation. Instead of hiding the data, we are now displaying the last quote we have and updating this data once every 5 minutes in the background. This leads to even further savings because only those symbols that are visible are subscribed to for real-time data. As seen in the screenshot shown below, as I scroll down my list of symbols, the symbols in hibernation are nearly grayed out. When I let go of the mouse button, all visible symbols are immediately subscribed, and the data begins flowing in again. Percentage Scale In eSignal 10.4, you now have the ability to display a new type of price scale based on the percentage move. To activate this new scaling option, click on Advanced Chart -> Scaling -> Percentage Scale. This will change the price display along the Y-axis to show the percent change based on the left-most bar. As the chart is moved left / right or zoomed in / out, the scale will automatically adjust to show the new values. Paper Trading with Tick Replay Paper trading plays a big part in learning how to trade. You can now practice with simulated live data using the Tick Replay feature in eSignal. To do this, click on Tools -> Tick Replay -> Tick Downloader to download the data set you want to practice on. Then, head to Tools -> Tick Replay -> Replay Tick File to begin reliving that trading day for that symbol. From there you can use the paper trading features built into eSignal, such as Trading from Charts or the Attached Order Ticket. VWAP Calculator Under the Tools menu is a new calculator that allows the user to get a VWAP value when certain dates / times are specified. One can also apply size filters to include or exclude trades of a given size to estimate where certain trading groups are putting their money into the market. That is to say, one can determine what the VWAP would be if large block trades are removed or if only large block trades are used. Alternatively, the Weekly VWAP could be generated with this tool, which is a nice way to see what the average price was for the week. Time & Sales â Filter by Condition A new filter choice is available for locating trades by condition. The filter can be a partial entry of the condition, such that âextâ would result in all âExtHoursâ trades showing in the Time & Sales window. --------------------------------------------- Enhancements / Corrections Time & Sales â Trade Coloration for Single-Sided Quotes Some exchanges send quotes without a matching pair, and previously, eSignal was having difficulty determining what the trade coloring should be under certain conditions. eSignal 10.4 corrects this flaw, and trade coloration is now working as expected. For more information about additional enhancements and corrections, please refer to the readme.txt file in your eSignal directory.
Jay, Paper trading with tick replay is a great new function. How many days of historical tick data can you use? Also, a lot of EFS scripts that worked for me in versions up to 10.2 do not run in version 10.3. Will these scripts work in 10.4? Runningbear
With all due respect why waste your time posting this, if you can't even meet the basic subscribers needs? Fix your basic data issues then try to come back and sell additional items! (Its as if Esignal is tone def or illiterate) I remember Esignal moving towards what their customers wanted a few years ago. Now, It seems like, screw them just sell the sheet. Jay, I know your a good guy, but Esignal is suckling on the B.S. Teet! Give traders what they need and you can stop having to be the B.S. salesman! Of course you won't respond to this. (Thats just what Esig is all about!)
Hi RB, Thanks for the feedback. I agree its a great tool. Paper Trading is perfect with Tick Replay, and it really allows for a greater degree of hands-on testing / praticing before putting real money on the line. Currently, you can download up to 10 days of tick data at once, but you can stitch together multiple days within the same file using notepad. The data format's easy to read and understand. Also, in eSignal 10.5 (~June, 09) one of the items we're planning on adding is the extended historical and tick databases which will push those 10 days out to a whole year stored on our servers... I don't believe we'll have the whole year downloadable all at once due to the network impact that it may imply, but we're still looking at this process. More will come on that in a few months.
I think there is a reason for this: Data reliability cannot be advertised (or to a lesser degree), only experienced. In contrast, all those fancy features can be advertised, and, in fact, will attract new customers. One has be aware that the average 'trading career' ist relatively short. Most aspiring traders will blow out within months, some will last maybe a few years but will never achieve significant returns and give up one day. So, customer fluctuation for data vendors is relatively high, even if the offer reliable data. So it makes much more sense for eSignal to concentrate on those fancy features instead of trying to fix the data issues. Only then they will be able to attract enough new customers to replace the vanishing old ones. Unfortunately, that's bad for all (retail) traders approaching this as a business and maybe even earning a living by trading. But, let's face it: We are the absolute minority. From a marketing point of view, we are insignificant.
There is no better indicator of eSignal's approach to its customers than their behaviour in this thread. The eSignal rep responds to the member who has a neutral/positive comment. What's their response to the client who makes the totally understandable complaint about the fact that eSignal is trying to add new features when they can't even supply consistent intraday data? They ignore him. As recently as last week, users complained about badly lagging basic data services. eSignal's response? 'We are working on the problems and adding servers in an effort to fix them'. Do a search from 2005 and see what they were saying then. Yes, you guessed it. The same damn thing. There is no earthly reason to pay eSignal's ridiculously inflated prices for poor quality data. The other low-level vendors aren't any better in terms of quality, but they're 60% of the price.
I love you for this post. You sound like a former esignal employee who got fired and now is trying getting back at them. hahaha I've been trading for about 11 years now. I can say I'm trading for a living for the past 4 years. And I've been using esignal for the past seven years. And they were really good. Version 8 is still good enough for me but I'm considering switching. It's really bad that esignal hasn't that many competitors.
Question for Jay F - or anyone else: why is there such reluctance to allow historical data storage on trader's hard drives? It seems that this would: - allow much faster changes between various instruments as all of the data would not need to be reloaded each time - reduce loading on eSig servers which would then reduce data lag (which would then reduce customer whining, etc, etc, etc) - provide a market for eSig to sell market data beyond some date (say 1 year or older) I suspect that there's probably a decent reason but superficially from my naive viewpoint, the positives outweigh the negatives by more than a little .... R