Anyone able to expand on Ensign website's warning about the FXCM data feed delays and data feed change? "WARNING: The FXCM feed has lagged behind during periods of high activity and volume. Ensign intends to implement a different forex feed to overcome this potential for lag with FXCM." I get Ensign info from their published weekly class transcripts which are delayed a few weeks. Wondering if someone attended the internet class. Was just on the verge of subscribing to Ensign for their forex feed and studies.
This is an excerpt from the just published 3-7-07 Ensign weekly class: FXCM Update 17:50 Ensign Howard: Ok, now for my final training topic.... the forex feed from FXCM. 17:55 Ensign Howard: Ensign developed in interface and servers to handle a free feed from FXCM for their forex currencies. This was a monumental project in 2006 and we released the feed for use by users in early January of 2007. Things have gone very well with few glitches over the past 2 months.... 17:56 Ensign Howard: However, we have had a few days with high volume or high activity and the feed from fxcm lagged behind, which we considered to be of real concern and unacceptable. We have talked with FXCM and got them to acknowledge the problem can happen. The queuing of the data is happening on their server side, and thus is not in the control of Ensign to change. They did say they have a way to access quotes directly from their order desk before these quote go into the queue for the data feed. 17:58 Ensign Howard: Ahhh.... that opened up a solution to get the feed from the source as it happens before it goes into the feed queue for distribution on the feed we were processing. So we have proceeded with haste to tap into this order desk source, and have had the new feed working well for the past 3 days. 18:00 Ensign Howard: We are continuing to make changes to our implementation to make it more efficient, and will continue to test this feed ourselves with the expectation that if all continues to go well, we will make the change this coming Monday to replace the current forex feed from FXCM with a data stream directly from their order desk. 18:01 Ensign Howard: I had hoped to see a period of high activity so I could compare the two feed side by side, and see lag in the existing and no lag in the new. However, there has not been a period of such high activity to cause the existing to lag this week. So, I continue to test and compare the two feeds. Anyway, that is an update on what we are doing and why and where we are headed with the free forex feed from FXCM. 18:03 Ensign Howard: We intend to pick up 2 advantages by the new implementation and the primary advantage is to eliminate any lag in periods of high activity and the 2nd unexpected advantage is we can get data on 12 more currency pairs that are not released on the regular feed. That will give our implementation 54 currency pairings on our forex feed. So I guess cleverness can pay off in additional ways
The warning on the Ensign website referred to in the first post is gone so they must have implemented the new non-delayed FXCM feed. 'Guess the moral is if you're a FXCM customer the best data source for you is Ensign Software. Same data just not delayed during high volume!