Whilst the SGXNK data feed from IB is fine to give you a feel of the market, what I found for data that it was unreliable during real time trading. What I mean by this is that very often I found that my charts would give me a very different picture of price and indicator after a refresh. To the extent that what I believed was a set-up before the refresh, was in fact not a set-up after refresh. i.e. I could not rely on what the chart/data was illustrating. I now use esignal which is expensive but very stable. Just something to keep to try out for yourself.
I use IB TWS to provide the data but it feeds into Sierrachart and the result is both reliable, timely and tradable. I'm sure that ensign behind tws would also be good (once u got the symbol right ). The description of "a very different picture of price and indicator after a refresh" is a charting problem rather than a data problem (or it darned well should be!!) I have a friend who is an esignal fanatic (big programmer) but he uses IB/SierraChart for HSI simply because he discovered (as have others) that esignal will lag the hsi action --- it usually represents the data accurately but not always in a timely manner.
I have found IB data to be good enough for the asian exchanges (HKFE,SGX) that i trade. To use IB data, its impt to make sure your pc clock is sync accurately, since the price is timestamp with your pc clock. I have found esignal to be unrealiable for asian exchanges. For traders in asia trading asian mkts, i find it funny to use esignal since data travels from asia, to esignal's us servers than back to asia. For something free like IB, i am happy with it.
I to believe that the NK 225 trades very well based on volume profile and reacts very nicely to sell and buy climaxes. You get little of this reversion to the mean crap that the ES pull each day.
As Kiwi said, the problem is not with the IB datafeed, which is fast and reliable. xiaohu's point about the PC clock is important. PC clocks are not very accurate and drift quite quickly. I sync mine every 30 minutes.
Bolter thanks for the reply, great thread on Market Profile I am interesting in learning MP, I know it will take time, but be worth it
A couple of more basic questions if I could ask. What is the tick value of Nikkei 225 on Singapore exchange? I went to the website about a month ago, hard to find, and couldn't get alot of info. For those of you that may use IB with Sierra Charts can you tell me the right symbol, I have tried SGXNK-200606-SGX.mnd and I get no data to display when IB's basic charts show the market quite active? Thanks so much in advance. I can see why folks like this market, look at the trend on the 5 minute!!
symbol for Sierra chart is SSIM6-FUT-SGX I used to use Esignal but found the Asian data lagged as Kiwi mentioned so switched and have had no problems using the IB data.