Also note that different data sources cover different markets -- usually not a big factor but exact highs/lows or if a particular idea of exact volumes are important to you, this may worth keeping in mind. Welcome to the age of fragmented (or competing for the optimists) markets.
I understand what you are saying and if you are happy with IB's free data service I am happy for you...may you have more winners than losers....
What no one has mentioned is the low bandwidth that IB uses. I have a laptop that I connect via 3g mobile to monitor positions when I am out/away and it uses very little bandwidth.
I'm probably going to be switching from CyberTrader to IB, 'cuz Schwab is stupidly dropping support for the CyberTrader platform. I use CyberTrader's APIs for both data and trading and they're both excellent. What I'd need from IB's data API is up to 2000 US equities snapshot quotes in less than a minute. Is this possible?
Probably not, unless you trade a LOT. The standard limit is 100 concurrent lines of data with more as your commissions rack up but getting to 2000 will be quite a haul. See: http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/fees/marketData.php
Like you, I am also switching for the same reasons. You should also probably take a look at MBTrading. They have an API that they seem to support, clear through Penson, comparable commissions. I only just started looking at them yesterday so I am not sure if it will meet my requirements yet, but there seems to be a pretty strong user group on Yahoo. I'll be going through all of the Yahoo posts to get an idea on how good the API and brokerage is. It's too bad that Schwab has decided to kill one of the most trader friendly brokers around. Echo
IB takes a "snapshot" of the trades every 200 milliseconds, which is every 1/5 of a second. The odds of this system "missing" the exact high or low ALL of the time are extremely low. However, it is true that EVERY tick is not sent under this system, so that a couple of things could be said: first, if your system of trading requires each and every tick, you need to buy a datafeed rather than rely on IB's free data feed. Second, if your system really requires each and every tick then chances are you need a new system. You are truly focused on too much minutia. Finally, when you subscribe to a datafeed, you may find that during active trading times it may well lag. ESignal comes to mind. So that under this system, you may well be receiving each and every tick....you just receive them with a time lag. LOL! This is because of the bandwidth constraints of providing every tick when you are trading heavy. OldTrader
Thanks for the tip, but it looks like MBTrading would be alot more expensive for me. My share sizes are bigger and the routing fees would kill me. I never realized how great CyberTrader was, until the jackasses at Schwab came along. Looks like it'll take IB, plus a data feed, plus a charting program to replace CyberTrader.
Im not an IB customer, past or present. I have no axe to grind. And up until now, I had respect for OldTrader posts... But, Who are you OldTrader, to even suggest that a (unknown) tick-based system is somehow invalid and needs to be replaced? In fact this entire post is nothing more than a backdoor evangelistic defense of the issue that the IB datafeed is not a true real time feed. The trader and system in use, as well as reasonable alternatives have been inappropriately slandered. Maybe the reason the IB feed doesn't go down or lag, (yea right), is because it's not a true real time feed. Osorico