Oh yeah sorry about that- I meant Ensign. CQG I have no experience with, but have heard very good things about them. So to clarify, I was referring to Ensign Toy Company.
Thanks. You have been using Ensign for some time though, you've said. It's a tricky business this data feed search. I think esignal is overpriced and clunky. I found there was no significant difference between it and an IB feed with Ensign. I'm sure CQG is good but for the benefit of a 20 milliseconds I'm not forking out shedloads of $'s. DTN I found lived up to the recent criticisms. Dificult to know which way to turn. One thing is for sure Button Trader is a great piece of kit but is an TWS dedicated API at the moment.
Yeah you're right, it's tough to find good quality products. I thought I'd found a good one with Ensign, until fairly recently...I kept giving them chances, but it fell through. I agree, CQG is expensive, and unless you're very well capitalized and really really short term, I think it may be a bit overkill. I am messing around with NinjaTrader right now, as I found out that they send orders to the brokers instead of holding them on your computer as I previously thought.
It appears most here are not professional traders. They don't consider this their full time business. Because if it was your business you could write off these software costs.
Yeah but part of running a business is trying to minimize your overhead while maintaining practicality. Just because you treat your trading as a "business" doesn't justify buying the most expensive stuff just because you can write it off. That's a silly way to run a business. I hope you realize that much. If you can save a few hundred $$$ a month by not requiring millisecond speed on your data feed..then why not? I use Ensign ONLY for the price histogram on dailies. I use SMR charting for my main trading decisions.
I used CQG for years before Ensign but found it overpriced and Ensign was great up till a little while ago. Your right though and I may have no choice but to go back to it.
You have that right. Best computer - Quad 6700 Overclocked, 4 gig Ram/16 gig max Best filber optic internet feed - dedicated 10-20 meg up/down Best datafeed (for the money) - eSignal Best Charting software (personal preference) - MultiCharts All written off as a cost of doing business and all upgraded regularly. I watch too many markets and too many charts to ever go back to Ensign. The first time I had to "refresh" I would kill Howard. I talked to one of his programmers the other day and he just laughed at what he is asked to do there. He said Howard is absolutely in the clouds as to what actual professional traders require so he programs for them on the side. Oh, the programmer uses MultiCharts for trading.