For specialized needs like yours, great! But I think most users just want live quotes and are not (unlike you) really analyzing the data tick by tick. For them, the risk of falling behind would be more of a problem.
Stop talking bullshit. THis is a full CME feed that does NOT fall behind on an end user DSL connection. And you should NEVER EVER trade from home. The moment you are on a virtual machine in a data center, bandwidth is even less an issue. The only reason to trade from home is utter stupidity - too many things can go wrong (power failure, your end user line going down for hours) - a data center costs nearly nothing and has a lot better SLA in place. If that is possible, then the risk of falling behind on something like single symbols is a sign of incompetence on the provider side. I have pretty much no interst in anything except max. 30 of those symbols, I just collect them, too, because they are there in case.
I'm not talking about your feed. I am not talking about you or about high frequency traders. I am addressing an issue raised by an earlier poster talking about people trading from home, not at a data center. He said roughly- "oh I heard IB drops ticks or something - is that a problem with them?" I was just explaining to him why it is not an issue for manual trading, and as a matter of fact the IB sampling-gated architecture is superior for most manual traders, because it will never lag behind. A number of other major brokers and feed providers have experienced incidents where they do lag behind in their quotes which is disastrous. Are they incompetent? Yes, in my opinion, for attempting to deliver every tick over an architecture and infrastructure that will not support it.
They absolutely are. THough sometimes innocent - some major US exchange has been known to lag significantly, which leads to an event cause flash crash because not only did they lag, they also had non-lagging timestamps (generated not when ata was generated, but sent) so it was not visible. But whatever size you trade, there is no excuse for doing it from home. You can be a hobby dude - the moment you leave SIM, trading from home is puree incompetence. You don't have to be like me (or rather us, I have full time developers on trading), running your in house simulation grid, testing out 2-3 new approaches every week. The moment you trade cash, doing so from home is reckless. Bad latency (For automatic stop management), unreliable slow connection (again, automatic stop management), unreliable power supply. Get a low end VPS somewhere close to where you want to be (depends what you trade - our trading agent's run on machines in chicago as we only trade CME). That neutralizes a LOT of the problems you can possibly have at home. Nothing about HFT here. I would be more concerned about power / connectivity glitches. For anyone not US that also handles the latency to the US - our offices (in Poland) are around 130ms behind USA. Even for manual it does - if you use computer assisted trading (auto stop, trailing etc.), and I think most do. You really dont have to go larger and have a server room and 260 kg batteries for emergency power in the basement like I do a VPS makes sense the moment you trade a minor 1000USD account.