I just wanted to ask about IB and Sierra, I have read some nice reviews about them, but not sure about the backfill. Can you only get 10 days for free from IB? If so, can anyone recommend a place for decent backfill going back further? I am looking only at the emini feed for real-time and historical backfill. I was not sure about this, but can you get the continuous contract backfill from IB? Heh, and also, with Sierra, do you have to maintain the database locally on your drive? Thanks for the input, any other suggestions are totally appreciated, right now I am just hunting for a decent real-time feed for the emini's that has backfill and preferably is all server side...if possible. I don't mind paying for the stuff either.
I was just looking at the SC site. They provide a link to a service called SCMagic which apparently provides backfill. I've never used any of these, but if QCharts is closed I will be looking for a replacement. BTW, does the IB feed have TICK, TRIN, PREM and Adv/Decl. QCharts has some really nifty intraday breadth measures.
Thanks AAA...to be honest i am not sure if IB has those or not, since i have still not used IB's charting feature. TICK and PREM would be excellent....Adv/Dec as well...i have not used TRIN too much but it would be a good one to have. I use prophet.net right now and am not very happy with them. So rather than upgrade my account and subcribe to the emini's through prophet I am looking for alternative charting software and emini real-time data provider. Since IB's data is free...heh, i figured why not give it a try with Sierra (they are really cheap), but I am undecided. I will check it out and see if IB has them. How do you find Qcharts? I was thinking of using them myself...it just seemed like they were getting some fairly negative reviews here on ET...especially regarding the reliability of the data feed. But for $95/mth +$20/mth for the emini i would hope they should be decent?
QCharts is a great charting program, very intuitive and easy to use. Reliability is pretty good these days. They offer a lot for the money, but it takes some digging on their website to find a lot of things and their customer service is nonexistent. Luckily, you seldom if ever need it. If you just want to see the emini's and aren't interested in a lot of other stuff, like breadth measures, historical data on intraday charts, etc, then I think the IB feed with Sierra or Medved Quote Tracker should be fine.
I use IB / SC combo for futures. Backfill goes as far as the begining of the current contract down to a 1m increment. The data is stored locally. Works great for me.
The backfill can be quite extensive depending (i think) on the contract ... I used 60 days at one stage and that worked. I've since wound it back to 10 just because I'm usually only getting 1-3 days so it seemed silly to leave it set so high. But you can get more extensive backfill using SCMagic (years). Yes you do get some of the tick/trin measurements for various exchanges. Whats (currently) available is in the exchange lists on the IB site.