I am a RealTick customer, who for the most part (except for their big outage day last year !) is satisfied with service. I am not, however, satisfied with their price. I tried eSignal 7.3 last year, and found these 4 problems, and decided at the time, not to go with them. Can anyone verify whether or not these 4 problems have been remedied or not in 7.5 ? 1) I have built elaborate spreadsheets using RealTick's DDE API interface, based on their Level I data. I use these spreadsheets as my screening tool. eSignal has an equivalent DDE interface, so I converted my spreadsheets over to use them. Lo and behold, on eSignal, I found many instances where the Level I data (Best bids/offers) were not in synch with their Level II market depth data - only for illiquid stocks. This drove me crazy, and happened many times. 2) Which leads me to problem # 2. The telephone support was very bad. Had to wait on hold for almost 40 minutes once \ during the trading day, and when I finally got through to someone to complain about specific instances where the data was out of sync (problem above), the guy on the phone new nothing at all. Very poor customer support. Contrast that with RealTick - I never seem to wait on hold more than 15-20 seconds, and a good number of their staff is knowledgeable. 3) I have dual internet lines at home (broadband and a backup dialup line), both of which are always active. If my primary line fails, RealTick always detects that, and automatically transitions over to my secondary line, whose route becomes active. With eSignal, if my primary line went down, the application would attempt to re-connect on my other line (via my alternate route), and I would get a "DUPLICATE ID" error, that would prevent my connection. I had to exit the app, and re-start to get it working. Hence, eSignal's failover algorithms are inferior to that of RealTick's. 4) You may think this is stupid, but RealTick has an audible indicator that can be invoked, any time the book changes on the market maker screen. I have become totally reliant on this indicator to alert me to a change in the books. eSignal does not have this - I requested it as a feature improvement. I found it very hard not to have this indicator around. Does eSignal now support this on their Montage screens and their NYSE Open Book screen ? Thanks in advance, to anyone who can confirm/deny the above problems for me.
The most common reference to volume colored bars is based on: the close compared to the previous day's close (or other time frame). eSig has only 2 native options: 1. based current price (useless when using candles anyway) and: 2. based on volume compared to yesterday's volume. IMO this is a ridiculous flaw. I'm about to familiarize myself with their script language (EFS) and I'm hoping I'm able to re-configure.
ktmexc, I agree completely. Candle coloring based on open-close is right, but volume coloring should be based on relative closes. The eSignal folks seemed to think that was worth a change, and by the next release, we'll see. One way I find volume coloring useful is in one minute charts, as a clue to whether (short term) buying or selling interest is greater. Since eSignal volume coloring can give a false signal, ie red on a higher close, and green on a lower close (relative to previous the close), I keep OBV visible. It seems to be based on relative closes, and is an easy check on whether you can believe the candle coloring - if that helps any. davez