What are people using for quote feeds? I'm interested in hooking our software up to some commercial feeds. We are looking for feeds that supply APIs available in C++ that are high-performance and reliable. Our customers will use these feeds to do realtime trading so the feed must be both reliable and fast. I have in the past used S&P Comstock, and QFeed from Quote.com (which was very unreliable). I'm more interested in a mix of popular/reliable and a decent price-point than pure cost. We'll probably accomodate three different feeds, what should these be? - Curtis
It depends on what you want to trade - The gold standard feed in one market is rarely the gold standard in another. All of these have API's. If you want the best in options, look at Hyperfeed. It is outrageously expensive, but worth it. Otherwise, for equities, Realtick is very good. As far as futures, I have never seen anything better than InteractiveBrokers, with Realtick a decent second. I am looking for good feeds for international markets. If you end up finding anything out on this, I would appreciate the feedback as well. nitro
nitro, thanks for the advice. How expensive is outrageously expensive for HyperFeed? Does anyone have experience with TurboFeed or DTN? - Curtis
Curtis, Between $5K and $10K a month, plus as many PTP T1s as you need, depending on the number of symbols you track. DTN satellite is ok, but a notch below Realtick IMO. Also, from what I understand, the DTN satellite API is _not_ programmer friendly. If you do not need up to the second quotes and are "swing" trading, any of these feeds are fine. It is when you get to the microstructure of the markets that you get what you pay for. nitro
Hi, I use DTN's IQFeed - really good value, just $50 buck p/month. I run it in metastock 24 hours for Globex and I can't recall anytime thats its been down. DTN make a few claims that you've probably read from their site: https://www.iqfeed.net/traders-soft/index.cfm?repnum=457393 "While most quote feeds on the Internet provide a snapshot of real-time data, IQFeed provides a TRUE, tick-by-tick datafeed. This feed is completely unfiltered, allowing you to see EVERY TRADE that occurs in real-time. Because many symbols trade dozens of times per second, you could be missing more than 50% of the actual trades!" "While other quote feeds resell data from 3rd parties such as S&P Comstock, all IQFeed data is direct from each exchange. Our feeds are the fastest because we eliminate the middleman." Hey, I wanted to ask - now that you're back in the game, are you still trading the turtle methodology or variation there of, and is the market being kind to you this time round. Good luck. Sam
Thanks for the information on DTN. One of the many different strategies I trade is a variant of a Turtle-Type breakout system. We also do things that are very different than what the Turtles did. We trade short-term swing systems, medium-term trend following, and long-term trend-following systems. Most of these don't look anything like the Turtle system. Volatility-based position equalizing and volatility-based stops are common to many of them however. Likewise the money management is a more-sophisticated variant of what we used to use. - Curtis
Curtis, For a vendor equity feed Comstock is tough to beat. I believe their average value added latency (the delay versus direct exchange feeds, which is caused by their ticker plant data processing) is in the neighborhood of 60 milliseconds which is pretty solid for a vendor feed. We've also been very pleased with their API support. They offer a host of international data as well. If you need options, though, the price goes way up. You'll need three T1s of bandwidh for them since equity/options data rates are exceeding 30,000 messages per second these days. You may also want to check out SunGard: http://www.marketdata.sungard.com/feeds/feed/index.htm Feel free to PM me if you need more info. - Rob
Armo, How do you hook up IQFeed's datafeed into Metastock ? I couldn't find any instruction on IQFeed or Metastock's website. Thanks.
WinSum, You need a free utility called HyperTrader Lite - http://www.hypertrader.it/hserverl.shtml Installation wasn't particularly intuitive, so give me a yell if you get stuck. Sam