Hi guys, I am new to the site here. I have been trading for a little over a year now, did terrible at first but have started to show some progress. I have recently come up with a significant technical problem. My internet service provider caps my bandwidth at 80gb per month. I thought for sure that would be no problem. Well, I think that keeping thinkorswim running on my computer several hours a day, with multiple charts open, is apparently using a major portion of that bandwidth. I just hit the limit and I am being tapered off for the rest of February. Not much I can do now for February, but I am looking at the future. Of course if I hit my bandwidth limit, my ability to trade is severely curtailed. So, I would like to do something else that allows me to still look at multiple charts in real time, but doesn't eat up my bandwidth so much. I have heard that thinkorswim uses a lot of bandwidth because it streams every bar (even the ones that are complete). I don't know if that's true, but if it is, I had best figure out an alternate charting package, or I won't be able to continue. Anyone have any ideas or had any experience with that? Thanks in advance, Joseph
Just running TOS shouldn't be using anywhere near 80gb per month. All it is doing is sending price data. I use Ninjatrader and at best for one product (6e) level two data I am using under 200mb per day. Think about it; you are 19 days into the month and used 80GB? That is 4.21GB per day. How long would TOS keep customers if their platform used 4GB per day? What else do you use the connection for? Do you have kids in the house using it? Wife using it to stream video? Are you using a wi-fi router? Is it secure? Maybe one of your neighbors is using your unsecured connection.
You must be able to pay a surcharge for extra usage, surely? Selling bandwidth is what your ISP does for a living? Respectfully, this doesn't sound right at all: surely the bars are created by an application running on your own computer, and only the data from which they're compiled is transmitted? That shouldn't be using so much bandwidth?
Yes one kid and the wife, and they look at facebook a lot. I have streamed some video myself, but it is usually just 5 minute news clips on youtube, and maybe a 1 hour show once a week. I am wondering myself about how it is possible we used this amount. Don't think it is possible any neighbors could be using our system. Summary - my video streaming is not more than 2 hours per week, and it is rarely HD stuff, just news clips from Philippine news channels and maybe a single 1 hour show (that is probably HD though - history channel). My kid listens to podcasts and my wife does facebook. The reason that I was thinking it was TOS is because when I have it set up, I usually have about 5 different charts open in different windows at the same time, and I have been leaving it on for hours at a time even when I wasn't using it, so I could switch over to it and monitor futures and forex outside of trading hours. But if it still seems highly unlikely I am using that much with TOS, I will really have to investigate more thoroughly where the usage is coming from. I suppose I should probably put some kind of bandwidth usage monitor on my pc. I run a linux system. I will have to investigate how to do that.
Well I found out today it is not as bad as I thought. Once I am over my limit, they taper me down to 3mbps until the end of the month, so it is still useable. As far as the streaming quotes go, I was surprised when I read that on this link: http://www.trade2day1.com/2014/03/thinkorswimmers-use-your-data-wisely.html#.VscGSbJ943w The post is 2 years old, so I don't know if what he says about streaming quotes is still accurate. I think though that what you say has to be true - once the bars are on the computer, they have to be fixed and wouldn't be part of the datastream anymore. However, maybe the idea is that instead of caching the chart when I have looked at it once, if I click over to a new stock, and then come back to the first one, it streams everything over again the 2nd time. This seems to be what it does that I have noticed. It takes time to load each new chart, even if I have looked at it earlier already. When I read that, it made me consider looking at perhaps getting some other charting software so that I don't have to rely solely on TOS.
ToS builds the bars on the server and sends them to the client without much caching. Bandwidth usage is not a top concern it seems. If you have a US account, you can use 3rd party software to access and trade TD Ameritrade accounts, such as ours (https://www.medvedtrader.com) If Canadian, then your options limited, at least as far as being able to use TDA Data. You can still use 3rd party software, but would have to get your own datafeed to feed into that software, such as IQFeed or Stockwatch. Either way should be way more efficient bandwidth usage than what you are getting now (in MT, don't turn on the Yahoo or Google news though. That uses tons of bandwidth)