I am in the early stages of programming a AT system in java to trade with IB. I have seen where some people use eSignal data rather than data from IB. I am wondering if that is the best route and why. Is there better choice? My system may monitor up to about 500 stocks at a time. Does IB have a limit on the number of stocks for which you can simulaneously recieve tick data? Does eSignal? I will need to regularly get historical data. Which data source is better for historical data? Thanks in advance
if you need historical data then you can't rely on IB. How accurate the historical data you need must be ( tick, minutes) ? Besides, I think IB has a limitation of 100 stocks, not esignal if you pay enough.
IB limits you to 100 concurrent streaming instruments unless you do more than $800 commission per month. Thereafter you get one additional symbol per incremental $8 commission.
You might want to take a look at http://www.opentick.com. I don't know if it is reliable enough yet for serious use, but it is very inexpensive There is a Java API, 1000 symbol limit and it is platform neutral. The Java API library code connects direct to the tick server(s) - there is no local server, caching or anything else. In other words a pure Java solution - unlike a lot of others which have local Windows specific code.
I did and had some problems. Specifically if the TCP connection was dropped the library code was spinning and chewing up all CPU. In short it was unreliable. However I only partially completed my own code, so it wasn't really a fair evaluation, and I didn't put in the required effort to isolate the issues - though I was certain the problem was on the OpenTick side of things. I decided to just leave it on the backburner and revisit some time later. That was a few months ago. I'll probably fire it up again soon and have another look. Since then there has been a new release of the Java API and it is open source. Furthermore they said they were documenting the protocol and opening that up, so in principle you can fix any problems with the API itself.
Thanks for the info dcraig. On closer look, Open Tick is looking a bit iffy. Their forum looks like a lonely place. Searching on ET reveals mostly less than glowing comments. I'd like to see something like that take off, but the old saying about "getting what you pay for" comes to mind. Experience teaches that the most valuable thing we have is time. I'd rather spend some money on a good data source than spend alot of time trying to make a poor one work. How about IQFeed?
IQFeed is an excellent data feed; IMO faster and more reliable than eSignal (personally, I wouldn't consider using IB's feed). A problem for system testing is the lack of a second stamp on the feed (my understanding as of six months ago is that they have addressed this shortcoming and a second stamp will be present on the next major release of the IQFeed client). My only other complaints would be that you only get 8 days of tick data backfill (a bit light) and the quality and variety of their forex quotes is a lacking. The pricing is very reasonable, and they have outstanding customer service. Although I have never used it, Metastock's QuoteCenter data feed looks great on paper. The only problem is that it has hardly any vendor support that I'm aware of (apart from Metastock, of course). I don't know about it's real-world performance. http://www.equis.com/products/realtime/quotecenter/?overview
Does Metastock's QuoteCenter have an open API? I hunted around on the site and didn't see a mention of it.