The 30 ms delay may be true if you are in the East Coast, but the latency increases as you move further to the West Side. If you trade in San Diego for example, there will be multiple relay points if you subscribe your feed from vendors, and that increases the delay beyond just 30 ms...by getting NQDS/NTDS, they can provide that feed quicker and you can see the differences, especially on high volumes (I placed Realtick side by side with another software that takes NQDS, and I noticed a half second of a difference). Besides, speed is not the only thing in concern, reliability is better with direct feed because you don't have a middle man (vendor) that introduce another point of failure. The reason we trade with direct-access technology instead of online broker is to avoid the middle man, so why would we do differently when it comes to the feed?
FWIW, Tradecast is for sale. Some propfirm should make them an offer. Sounds like Ameritrade would give it up for 30 cents on the dollar. Beats the hell out of what some firms are using. Doesn't Datek still own Watcher? Ameritrade merges, then unloads By Troy Wolverton Staff Writer, CNET News.com September 10, 2002, 2:24 PM PT Just as it wound up one acquisition, Ameritrade is unraveling another. The online brokerage completed its merger with rival Datek, Ameritrade announced on Monday. It will also sell off its TradeCast unit, acquired last year, and plans take a related $65 million noncash charge, the company said separately on Monday. "In our evaluation of the Datek assets, we recognized redundancies with TradeCast and decided to leverage Datek's technology in a way that also allows us to be more productive," said Joe Moglia, Ameritrade's chief executive officer, in a statement. Ameritrade has been on a buying spree over the last year. In addition to TradeCast--which provided technology that allows traders to make direct stock trades---the company bought National Discount Brokers last year. It announced a merger agreement with Datek in April of this year. Ameritrade's moves come as many investors have lost their enthusiasm for online stock trading amidst the depressed market. While the brokerage's response to the decline of online stock trading has been to gobble up competitors, rival E*Trade Financial has gone a different direction, diversifying away from its brokerage base into banking, mortgages and insurance. Ameritrade purchased TradeCast about $40 million in stock. The company used TradeCast to launch Ameritrade Pro for professional and active stock traders last fall. It said Ameritrade Pro would not be affected by the sell off TradeCast. Ameritrade does not yet have a buyer for TradeCast and has no timetable for selling off the company, said the brokerage's spokeswoman, Natalie Carlson. For the time being, the company will continue to operate as a unit of Ameritrade, which does not have any plans to cut the unit's staff, Carlson said
I heard Protrader is closing or converting three more offices to "remote offices" (meaning they probably won't have onsite brokers and IT help) by year end. Tampa, Dallas, and Chicago. They must be hunkering down for the long winter to come. Anyone reading this from one of those offices? If so what are you guys doing? Staying with, going elsewhere?
Ave, you are correct that they are closing those branches. Their volume, as an overall company, is cratering. Many of the firms largest and most active traders are all splitting. The dallas office is remaing open through march, but thats it. I am not sure about the other offices. I think most the traders are either switching to another firm or continuing to trade through protrader at home.
I concur. Further, there is no noticeable difference from East or West Coast. A quality network can reach to almost any part on the globe - and return a response four times in each second. From West to East coast you would expect a latency of around 90ms - less than 1/10 of one second. Hyperfeed is like an ASP (Application Service Provider). They make a living adding products and services to their data stream, such as a HyperFeed Exchange Handler which is essential their tickerplant in a box. They also lay claim to developing their compression technology in a way that speeds up their data delivery which in theory compensate for some latency. Wireless, DSL and cable and even T1, DS3, etc. "can" be roughly equivalent in speed. Satellite unfortunately cannot compete - so trading from every remote location is not truly an option for the scalper. To test your own connectivity just go to a command prompt and type in, for example; "c:\ping 63.240.128.16". Read the return (the middle column) to find out the average time it takes to get back to your workstation. Hyperfeed uses AT&T Managed Services to host their network which is a decent backbone. NASDAQ uses UUNET - you can test your time to NQDS by using; ; "c:\ping 157.130.15.18". These are the edge routers that lead into the NASDAQ and Hyperfeed network - you cannot ping the actually edge router of Hyperfeed or NASDAQ because the routers are configured to not respond to UDP requests - but you can get one step away. SIAC feeds are the most venerable. They were cut off when the twin towers collapsed. SIAC is a 30-year-old network. They have contracted with ConEd Communications to build what it calls the Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI). Until it is done, they will likely be a touch more venerable to outages than say NASDAQ. No one backbone is impervious to downtime - even the entire Internet can be largely broken, such as was the case on 9-17-2001. While everyone was watching re-runs of the planes crashing into the twin towers, IT departments around the world were under a "NIMDA" attack. Some have estimated the cost to businesses were more than the cost of rebuilding the twin towers - but only the geeks that have the job of keeping your datafeeds going and your networks safe would remember that date - and a very bad week it was. Some part of the large UUNET backbone goes down almost every day. Just not the part you hope that you are using. To view the overall health of the Internet if you are having connectivity problems you may wish to visit http://www.internettrafficreport.com/main.htm. They ping major backbone router around the world and can highlight whole cities that are having difficulties. The next time your brokers network goes down, and there will be a next time, and you have $100K on the line, just be cool. If you hassle them on the telephone it will just take them that much longer to fix the problem.
Trading floors are closed. Dallas used to be the second most profitable floor, but last week was spent moving out all the furniture and PCs. The ten remaining traders from the Austin floor are being moved to the Corp. head quarters and put in empty office space. (that floor used to have 100 traders!) Austin floor will be empty by month end.
Let's get some facts about the top traders at ProTrader... None of them EVER made more than a few million a year. And that was during the go go years. And Andy lost several million during a market short squeeze on the day of the first surprise rate cut. ...just plain Ugly now.
I didnt know the offices were shut.......If you go to their website they boast about their trading centers...... and across the top is flashing centers that dont exist......