Yes gnome please explain. I have a core 2 duo 2.33 and a quad core 2.4 both with 4 gig ram @800mhz and running xp pro. I feel I shouldn't have to split loads since my setup is a quote board of 150 symbols and about 20 charts with volume and no efs studies or resource hogging processes. My cpu's never spike above 15-20% and pings to esignal and my trading applications servers are below 50-75 ms always. I really am doing everything on my end and am just so frustrated with these esignal problems.
This chart demonstrates the underlying issue here: http://www.charthub.com/images/2007/12/16/Weekly_Volume.png The lower pane shows a 20 period smoothing of weekly volume on the ES....which has doubled since the beginning of this year to almost 10 million contracts...almost 2 million contracts a day. This has doubled just since the beginning of this year. This is a pretty consistent trend with many instruments. So the number of trades/ticks that are getting piped through are twice what were last year. The servers, data feed clients, software programs, bandwidth...all are required to do twice the work...all else being equal. But this is only part of the story...the data feed (at least eSignal) is also sending all bid/ask/size changes....that occur between actual trades....and in some situations, the market depth information at prices outside the bid/ask. This data alone can be more than the actual trades themselves. Much more in some cases. The fact is, many users are getting sent alot more information than they need. Some are getting sent market depth but never look at it. Most are getting sent the bid/ask/size changes but don't care about it. Some are getting every tick, but really only care about every price change. The problem is, there are some that use tickbar charts...and need EVERY tick...and would complain if they started getting fewer bars than a competing package was showing. There are some users that need per bar and per price delta values, so they need the bid/ask price along with each trade. So the demands of some software and some users require the data vendors to send an excessive amount of information, which results in data lags in some situations. It's a tough situation. Who knows what the volume will be tomorrow, or a year from now....but I think we should assume it will continue to grow. Processing power and bandwidth will also continue to grow, but not likely at a rate that will keep pace with volume growth. It seems inevitable that the information is going to have to be sent in a more efficient manner. Some data feeds already do this by combining ticks (that may occur at the same price and time)....IB uses what they call "snapshot" quotes which tends to limit the pace of incoming quotes....but which many users complain about for reasons mentioned above (fewer tickbars, false marketdelta values, etc). I think we'll see various forms or combinations of tick compression, combining ticks, and/or paced quotes, as we go forward.
This is the infuriating part, institutionalised lying by the data vendors and brokers. It used to be called dishonesty, now I assume it just comes under acceptable customer "service" procedures.
Hi Gnome, My understanding is that you have to pay for a second eSignal subscription if you want to run eSignal charts on two computers simultaneously. But if you know of a way to send eSignal data from one computer to another, I would be very interested to hear how it is done. Thanks davez
My eSignal Time & Sales would very often lock up. Then I started using QuoteTracker (with eSignal feed) together with eSignal. Both the eSignal and QT Time & Sales would match during slowish trading, but as soon as things picked up the QT T&S would be clearly faster than eSignals T&S, even with the identical data feed. So maybe eSignals processing is the bigger problem (vs data feed speed). Which then brings up the question of why eSignal design has not kept up with old HT and now dual core processors. My biggest beef with eSignal though is it seems they they are not even pretending anymore to try to catch up to TradeStation's tools for equity traders.
As I posted earlier I ditched eSignal back in November...and switched to SierraChart using IB datafeed....for only $31 per month I am getting everything eSignal had to offer and more. I converted my system from EFS (10,000 lines of code ) to C++ in Sierrachart and I can't believe I did not know SC earlier. SC will also have automatated trading functionalities within 2 weeks that will make EFS' generic broker fuctions look like so-last-centuary. Furthermore, SC is an "open" platform - if you have data ranging from ticks to daily from other sources, you can easily integrate them into SC. If you are a hardcore data crunsher and have heavy duty data analysis funcions in DLL (COM), well you will be thrilled. anyway, just thought to share my non-esignal experience so far. (ok, one thing I do miss is the automatic roll-over on future contracts (* #F) in eSignal that I have to maintain in SC myself.
Does Sierra supply any backfill in addition to what IB gives you? I guess that's what I'm still paying Esignal for.
Yes they do, its approx. $5 more a month that service. I pay $31 for Sierra and use TransAct, it's a good value.
To many low cost and free services out there Chuck . I use Quote Tracker with feeds from Mb Trading , IB , and Scottrade. No way would I ever pay for a quote service again. I did use E-Signal before it started having all these issues that I read about. This was maybe 3 years ago . I stopped using E-Signal because there was no way I could justify paying for something that I could get for next to nothing . Quote Tracker costs me $ 75 a year . I think that is less the monthly fee for E-Signal.
Quote from Chuck_T: dandxg, We are working on that and many other new exciting features for 2008. Lots of improvements on EFS and integrated trading, new partners like TT, multi-threading, 64 bit support, improved trading from the charts, etc. It will be a busy year for eSignal releases. We have greatly expanded the engineering and QA staff for the desktop groups. Chuck @eSignal well, Chuck, once eSignal has all these fantastic features I will go back.... but the fact that you released v10 that is buggy, bloated, slow makes me wonder if what you had stated is merely a fantasy. I mean for a public company, how could you possibly release v10 at its state of being? where is QA? does that even exist at esignal?