Greetings to all, Getting ready to open an Amp Futures account. What are advantages vs. disadvantages for Zen-Fire vs. CQG data when using Ninja with Amp? My style is occasional futures daytrading, manual trading, not really any backtesting or programming. Any recent feedback or experience with either datafeed much appreciated. Thank you, Paul
Hi Paul, I also trade manually through AMP using Zen. Lots of people swear by CQG and others have told me that Zen is a rebranded product from Rithmic, which it apparently is. What does that mean to the discretionary trader? Maybe someone could poke in and give us some examples. Now, if you browse the NT support forums, you will see that CQG has its periods of downtimes and instability, as I am sure most other datafeeds do as well. There are video comparisons of Zen vs. CQG that some thoughtful ET'ers have posted, just do a search. It will show ZenFire lagging behind CQG during periods of high volume and volatility. This does not concern me that much because as a discretionary trader, I am usually flat during those periods. I have taken a CQG demo and ran it side by side with Zen in normal order flow conditions and they are virtually identical. Also, keep in mind that Zen recently started aggregating ticks. Again, not a game changer for me because I do not do any serious compiling or tick mining. I would say that for the last 3 years or so, Zen has performed very well and if I had to grade it, I would give it a 95+. Also, using limit orders (on the ES and YM at least) are almost always filled and sometimes I actually get price improvement.
Thank you - a good and thoughtful review. I'm getting ready to give Zen a test-drive in a live account this week, and was somewhat concerned about those videos I had seen before. I also avoid most periods that cannot be described as "normal order flow conditions," so any high-volatility lag is not really a concern (and I have a different primary data feed anyways - this will be secondary). I've also been poking around the interwebs looking for info on Zen-Fire, and it seems that many of the lag-comparison videos may be due to improperly configured or incompatible firewall/antivirus software. Zen is apparently more sensitive to this than other feeds. I can't speak from experience here, but some users claim no problems - even in fast markets, and others claim problems all the time, no matter what. Hence me going for a little test-drive to find out for myself . . (going to trade it side-by-side with CTS for a couple of weeks & see what I can find out . . ).
I'll have to take exception with Big AAPL's ". . . Zen has performed very well and if I had to grade it, I would give it a 95+." Zen-Fire had a couple of major outages - do a Search for Mirus Zen and you should find users reports. not to say ZF should not be used. I'm a CQG user and not long after AMP offered the feed there was a problem - again do a Search for AMP CQG also see the NinjaTrader forum since many 'Connection' and other feed problems will be posted there but not here on ET correct that feeds will go down from time to time, and, NT also has had numerous problems I have to say - not that it's useful - that in all the years I've used MetaTrader I have Never experienced at any time the sort of problems that NT and the various feeds have had, and I'll include paid services such as eSignal and TradeStation that other members repeatedly post about the problem though for me is that after using a stable platform I have a very low opinion of these other platforms that together with the feeds, remain as far as I am concerned unstable compared with the performance of MetaTrader and its feed/s
I tried NT7 on demo, & could barely stand it - (though to be fair, I only tried NT7 for a few days). So I was hoping that some of the Zen-Fire problems could be attributable to NT7's bugs. There's no way to be sure - but that is part of the reason I have suspended judgement on ZF until I can test-drive it live, with real $$ on a non-NT7 platform (which should begin this evening or tomorrow morning). I will be using Zen in Sierra Charts (if I can get it to work - which it is supposed to under the "Ritmic' data option) - so we'll see if that makes any difference. Also, Zen works with Multicharts - which will be my backup platform if ZF appears to have problems with Sierra. We'll see what happens, & maybe I'll report back with some observations after a few days . .
Well, I've been observing Zen-Fire with Multicharts for several hours so far today, & I haven't noticed any lag whatsoever compared to CTS - which I have sitting literally right beside it. Granted, there haven't been any fast-market conditions, but that is irrelevant to my style anyways, honestly. I haven't attempted any executions yet with ZF, because I wanted to observe for a while before placing orders, but the data has been identical to CTS - which I trust so far, because I haven't had any issues at all with CTS yet. Just reporting in with results - If I have any issues, I'll post them back in this thread for reference . . -Doug
I have done research on Zen-Fire and found it was a white label of Rithmic and was very expensive compared to CQG. I searched to find a Rithmic direct connection to test for my Ninjatrader and was disappointed to find only Optimus Futures--they are too small (last I heard on another forum, only 3 people working there). CQG is working very well for me and the price is perfect. They have been in business for 30 years, so I am very confident in the CQG technology.
I trade thru AMP with CQG for my clients and my personal account, have never had a problem in the 2 yrs I have been with them. * A sizable amount of hedge funds, CPOs, and CTAs use CQG data.
When mkts are very fast I have seen ZF to lag CQG by nearly 10 seconds. TT feed is best I have tried so far...