I have heard IB's feed is terrible for intraday trading ... say off a 5 minute chart. Can anyone comment? I know it is a pwerhouse firm just really inquiring specifically about the data for intraday use.
Swan: Read these threads: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=255236 http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=255329&highlight=data The second thread references the first thread but I think there is more general info in the first with comments about trading style in the second. Jack
I trade mostly off of 1-minute charts. I can't complain, but perhaps for your type of trading their feed would not be good enough.
IB feed is sampled and this ensures that it will work in all market conditions. This is not tick feed and the sample rate is 100 -300 ms which means that any bar charts should do fine. I do not know why IB feed is considered terrible but IB clearly specifies what they provide and they are consistent data provider. Please remember that you are always looking at the history because trade already occurred when it shows on your screen and bars are always historical because they show you OHLC stats for the past X seconds or minutes. You might be confusing chart application with data feed and IB tries to do them more fancy and on some machines it might not perform very well.
I can't imagine why the data would be inadequate for 5 minute charts. Maybe it's no good for HFT algos, but 5 minute charts?
How about time and sales? They use sampled data? Is this supposed to help us. I do not like it maybe because i am used to seeing all the prints and it find it difficult to judge tape speed with aggregate data. Anybody prefer the aggregate data?