Ok, since eSignal data feed is useless, what other data feeds might be worth investigating? I looked at DTN IQ, but after the review the one guy gave about never being able to unsubscribe, I was more than a little leary. On the other hand, someone mentioed using IQ and Ninja, and being really happy with that after leaving eSignal. I trade prop with Blackwood, so platform isn't an issue. I just need a basic charting program for price bars, volume, T&S, level I quotes for equities, futures, and indicies - all with capacity for multiple timeframes. Ironically, I like the eSignal page layouts, I just can't trust the quotes to be accurate and on time anymore. ANY constructive suggestions would be welcome - thanks!
I use Global Futures for brokerage DTN IQ Feed for data feed Quotetracker for charts and NinjaTrader for order entry *** Unless you need some special charting, I'd take a look at the Global/NinjaTrader combination. NinjaTrader has come light years with its charting (it was previously a very good order entry platform) ... and the data feed directly from the broker is always spot-on. I'm seriously thinking about converting my charting over to NinjaTrader ... but that's just going to be a lot more work ... oh well! Good luck, and hope that helps.
P.S. DTN is good for my needs, but they do have problems that you have to trouble shoot, and a trader who does not have a lot of experience may not be happy with them ... but the third-tier vendors who support them are on par with Interactive Brokers ... so you gotta take the good wid the bad ... it's the real world.
Judging from posts on ET --- it appears that IB is out of service more than any its peers I avoided them for that reason alone TOS is for us novice-types ---- but I have not seen it go down during the trading day since I have been using it (about 3 months)
Wow, all of those "finger-pointing" vendors ? Whew, IMHO, you are really asking for trouble. I use ONE vendor for: Charting Datafeed/Quotes Order Entry It's the only way to go IMHO.
I "grew up" on QuoteTracker, and I like they way they have evolved their charting system very nicely. DTN IQ is a decent data feed provider, and I run their data through models that I designed in excel to facilitate my trading. The brokerage and order entry platform I probably could combine though, you are right about that .... Just looking at it, yeah, I feel like I'm a little to souped-up and my trading system is too "pimped-out" for my own good ... I'll work on sliming it down.
Trader56, "I looked at DTN IQ, but after the review the one guy gave about never being able to unsubscribe, I was more than a little leary." There's a solution to this problem. As it turns out, it's a solution to many of the payment issues one can encounter on the net. The credit card I use has an online feature called ShopSafe. It allows you to create as many credit card numbers as you need. You can set the credit limit and expiration date for each one you create, and once a number is in use, it can only be used to pay the SAME merchant. You can cancel a card anytime you want. Since a given pseudo card number is linked to a single merchant, if one of your merchants gets hacked, the only thing anyone could do with the stolen credit card number is make a payment in your name to that merchant for less than or equal to the amount of credit left on that pseudo card.) The real beauty of this is that you never have to give your real credit card number to anyone. So, for example, I've have a card number allocated for use with esignal. After I canceled my esignal subscription a few days ago, I simply canceled the pseudo credit card I was using to pay the monthly bill. If esignal tries to bill me again, their request will simply get rejected as the card number is no longer valid. (I doubt esignal would try to do this, but I have had other merchants try to pull this sort of thing.) By the way, I was a very satisfied esignal customer for the last 6 years, but recently the feed has become a complete joke. Oh, and I tried going back to version 8 of the software --- that made absolutely no difference. I also tried their new "trade only" intraday chart servers. That improved loading times for intraday charts, but did not help the data lags, which have only gotten worse. Anyway, though I'm going to write my own charting program for the TWS API, I'm going to try IQfeed in the meantime with Sierra Chart, QuoteTracker, or DTNiq as the charting program. I, too, was put off by that post that spoke of the difficulty of quitting IQfeed, but using the ShopSafe credit card feature will solve this for me. I highly recommend that everyone look into ShopSafe or its equivalent. It makes using a credit card a whole lot less dangerous IMO.
Metastock Quotecenter. $135/month. Institutional grade platform at retail prices (was the Bridge platform) rather than vice versa as per you know who. You may be able to hook up a (only ONE?) third party app that is compatible with eSignal using Metaserver 3rd party adaptor (DDE adaptor for TS2000i I think - still not got around to it).
I've been thinking of signing on to DTN's iqfeed, but then i found opentick - Can anyone please explain why do you use dtn and not opentick (which is nearly free?) maybe i am missing something and opentick is a bad choice?