This has been happening since sometime in May... Suddenly eSignal stopped delivering good quotes and prices during the first hour or so of trading for many of the stocks I trade. I mainly trade fairly illiquid NYSE stocks, also some NASDAQ and a few AMEX. This problem happens with all three NYSE. NASDAQ, AMEX. Example from this morning (typical): I did a sweep between 10:00 - 10:15 AM EST of 777 stocks I trade. Out of the 777 stocks, 125 had wildly incorrect bids (mostly the premarket bids, like $0.01, or $1 below the market) (the test I did was for bids, but the problem is similar for offers and prints). Sometime during the first hour or so of trading, everything seems to get unclogged and I start getting (reasonably) good data with reasonable latency. Note #1: I pay for 1000 symbols. At no time am I using anywhere near all my symbols. Note #2: The eSignal market depth is working correctly (i.e., updating in real time with correct prices). However, the daily chart reflects the bad quotes. Note #3: I have tons of internet bandwidth unused while this is happening - but I really don't have to point that out, since eSignal market depth data is flowing normally. Has anyone else experienced this and found a way to work around it? I know from experience that eSignal is not likely to provide meaningful assistance; that's why I'm posting here out of desperation...
Demand a full refund from E-signal. Open an Interactive Brokers brokerage account. You will receive data reliably and for free, with very rare outages. If something does go wrong with IB market data, IB will take the problem very seriously and work at full speed to fix it. IB charts are improving, but if they are not adequate for you, then you just use Medved's Quotetracker to chart the data received from IB. QT is free and a very powerful and reliable charting program. Lots and lots of serious active traders use the combination of IB for brokerage and market data, with Quotetracker for charting the data from IB.
Thanks for the suggestion jimrockford, but alas IB is not the solution - I have been with IB for many years (satisfied - but rarely happy - customer), and you are correct that they take their market data seriously. But they have always had some artificial throttle on their market depth screens so it takes 2 - 8 seconds on average to bring up a new one. Needless to say, this makes IB market depth almost useless for traders who scan many stocks during the day. Also, I'm guessing you either don't use the IB API or you don't have a lot of market data lines in TWS. Last time I checked, IB doesn't have any option to stop the flow of market data to TWS, and if you have a certain number of ticking market data lines in TWS then IB stops delivering ANY market data via the API. Again, makes IB market data almost useless for traders like me.
My market depth screen on futures comes up almost instantly. You may want to see if the problem really is IB or if it's something on your end.
Trader442 Market Depth should be instant as Bundlemaker states. Please PM me and we can work to diagnose the problem.
bundlemaker and DAV - thanks for your inputs. I was just checking IB market depth in the last 10 minutes and you are both completely correct - it's fast, and as far as I can tell as fast as eSignal. My apologies for making incorrect statements in my post More correctly, I can say the following: First, the depth I use is 99% NYSE OpenBook, and always on illiquid stocks, and for a long time in the past what I posted was 100% true - but if that's really in the past then hey, I never should have mentioned it. Second, I still think (based on observations I was making about 3 weeks ago) that what I said is true sometimes, for OpenBook, and for the stocks I follow. I never had a problem whenever I tested futures or very liquid NYSE stocks.