ecns (well, island and arca) won't be free for much longer. also, freerealtime.com is still going along. not for active traders ,of course. i haven't checked out the original poster's site yet; will check later today... (i use realtick and the data at my 2 brokers).
ARCA is already not providing any free quotes. INET-till end of this month. no more free stuff. i knew it from day those ECN been bought by exchanges that it's not going to be good for little retailer.
I just tried the command line utility that they provide for downloading historical data. I tested it, by downloading one day of MSFT tick data. It took a very long time. Like maybe an hour. The file is a 110 meg text file. It seemed though that the slowdown was not from transfering the data, but how the utility processes it as it converts it to text. I say this, becasue the thing downloaded 38% of the data in a second or two, then started really working CPU while making very slow progress from there on out. This makes me think that using the API the data could be downloaded more quickly than the utility implies, by writing better code to buffer the data and process it as it ariives (saving it in binary format for example would help). For those who have used the API, does this seem to be the case? Downloading is fairly fast? Just from a quick peruse of the tick data, it seems to be very high frequency. (Higher frequency than IB's tick data for example.) I don't know if there are gaps or anything though. I certinately would like to get free historical tick data going back to around 2001 for a bunch of stocks, but I am aprehensive about diving into the API and then discovering that it is a waste of time because they don't have much coverage at that frequency between now and 2001. Can anyone who has used this data comment? I know someone said they don't go back that far, but what about say maybe 2003, 2004, 2005. Three years of high frequency data would probably be worth my time to work with the API a little if there aren't many huge gaps.
Exactly. Can you imagine... Running a 6 or 7 figure business... with such weak links in place? It could never happen.
Unfortunately, I do not have very good things to say about OpenTick either. I was really excited when I first discovered them, especially after I read through their API documentation. I only with they had been able to live up to their potential. The speed of historical data retrieval is abysmal, as is the reliability of the feed intraday. Unlike the other poster, I have had nothing but problems using the feed with SmartQuant, and our proprietary software. -segv
I have a programmer working with it and MultiCharts and it is working but not tradable yet. As one of the other posters mentioned, and I agree, the data integrity is lacking. MultiCharts is working on a tick filter and a few other things with OT to clean up their data. I would imaging that in 6 months it will be a decent alternative but for those of us that rely on our trading, I for one wll not switch from eSignal just yet.
Hello, My name is Joshua, I work at opentick and I just wanted to offer some more information about our service and resolve some of the random disinformation in this thread. First - Yes, opentick service is free of all charges. The only fees our users need to pay are exchange fees. We will be offering a broker-neutral order routing solution (also with an API) in the later part of the year; this is where our income will be coming in from, for those who are curious about our business. We hope to always maintain our free services. The support we've gotton from the trading community so far has been great! Second, I'd like to discuss our historical database. Someone noted we implied that we had 10-15 years of historical data and this isn't really the case. We have tick data going back to mid 2001, and that's it. It's true: our tick database is very much under construction at the moment. As of now there are indeed a lot of gaps. They will be fixed in time. We are continually importing more data. It is also true that our tick database may respond a bit slow at the moment. We are moving our recent database optimizations into production right now, but with such a large dataset it will take a few months for these changes to be live across the board. Once they are live the response times will be much faster. You can already test tick data requests for some time periods that are live with our optimizations. I'll spare this thread from too many specifics, but if you want to know more about this check our forum. In other news, we recently opened all our API sources into the public domain, and have a public CVS server available. We really welcome third party developers. We'll be launching a Wiki to house all of our documentation next week. It is also true that we don't support too many platforms at the moment. We are really just getting started here though. We've been quite impressed with MultiCharts so far in our in-house testing. We hope to have TradeStation 2000i and Neoticker ready to go soon. If you have any specific inquiries that I may be able to answer, you can contact me (josh at opentick.com) or just join our forum: http://www.opentick.com/forum/ You can sign up for an account without incurring any costs at all by simply using a delayed and/or historical data account. This will allow you to give our API a try and check out our historical data without any kind of financial commitment.
This email just confirms it is not a viable option at the moment. Any automated trader must have a fast and absolutely reliable feed from a company that can be relied on. Your company/service is a work in progress. Anyone serious is going to take a feed from an established vendor, e.g Reuters, Comstock, DTN e.t.c
Hello, Thanks to Joshua for posting a detailed summary of our current situation. I'm an owner and director in opentick and would like to add to what Josh posted. We have spent the past several years developing a unique market data provider. The idea for opentick came out of my internal needs for a quality, low cost real-time & historical tick data solution to build back-end trading systems. The product has evolved a lot over that time and obviously by this thread it has a ways to go. I believe we are in the process of addressing most of the issues that were brought up. As Josh mentioned, the market data is a loss leader used to generate order flow. The order routing aspects of our business will be unique to the market place and broker neutral. Our services will remain platform and broker neutral. We guarantee that, at a minimum, if our users do not use our order routing when it is available, a competitive fee will be imposed for our historical tick data. However, we will always maintain no cost services over the Internet and will work towards ever improving our products. Expect some exciting server-side solutions in the future as well as additional data sources as they become available. Also as Josh mentioned, we have open sourced all of the API code, sample application code, and published our base protocol. Clearly, this is a unique approach to a market data solution provider that allows the future of our product to be driven by the users. We are entirely open to suggestions on how to fine tune our product and make it the best possible market data solution. There are a dozen or more platforms in the process of integrating with otFeed. Please encourage your provider to work with us. Moreover, opentick development team is ready to assist development efforts in integrating our feeds as well as cater to specific needs of the various platforms and customers. You will find that the majority of requests by our users have been integrated, or are in the queue to be integrated, as resources are available. In light of our open source stance, we encourage developers to participate in integration. Feel free to call or email me directly with ideas and questions regarding our business. Also, we welcome your participation in our forum. http://opentick.com/forum/ Best regards, Noah Lieske noah@opentick.com +1.239.262.1628
It is true - DTN, Comstock & Reuters all have us beat for the level of service they provide, at least for the immediate future. None of them offer a historical tick database via API, as far as I know. Noah