Hi, I'm new so I'm not quite sure why I'm seeing so different prices between IB data and Kinetick data while paper trading ES mini sp 500. Someone has experienced the same thing, in some cases I see a difference of 2 point between IB and Kinetick. Someone know what is going on? I've heard that IB data is terrible, so I've created an account with Kinetick. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks! Joaquin
Maybe what you can do is post pictures of the exact same. plain, chart (maybe 5 minute) side-by-side, but one with IB data and one with Kinetick data. A futures chart like ES, NQ, or YM would probably be good. Then others who have different data feeds can match your settings and post their chart - and you can see what other data feeds produce and compare them against IB and Kinetick. The ones that have the most matches in appearance are probably the more reliable data feeds.
Here is a very simple test. The ES futures market opens at 6 PM East Coast time. There will absolutely be trades at 6:00.00000001. See if there is any difference in the first trade between the two feeds. If your charting package can look at ticks and has a very high resolution time scale look at both feeds. It won't matter if your PC clock is not perfectly synced to a world standard clock as you are only interested in the difference between IB and Kinetick. IB sends sampled data. In order to limit needed bandwidth (and maybe save money on servers needed) they send out the most current price and bid/ask about every 100 to 300 milliseconds. Last time I investigated Kinetick was sending out every tick (Trade) and bid/ask change as transmitted to them from the exchange. If there is a very heavy period of trading it is possible that your platform will fall behind as it might not be able to process the data at the rate it is being sent. It is also possible that Kinetick's data could fall behind and queue up while they are attempting to send everything to everybody over their available bandwidth. IB's maximum bandwidth requirement is known as they limit what is sent to what is received from the exchange at the instant the IB server is ready to send. There are pros and cons to each method. How it affects you depends on how you use the data. With an IB feed, you may miss some info, especially during busy periods when multiple things can happen during the sample interval. But what you get will be current when sent from IB. Some traders feel they need to see everything as the system they use is built on that type of data and IB data is no good to them. Kinetick satisfies them. Remember that the data you get from any vendor is always some number of milliseconds behind the actual trading at the exchange. Two Further notes - 1) IB's paper trading system has a separate set of servers. During periods of very high demand those servers may not keep up with the exchange data. IB provides substantial resources to keeping up with its real-time needs and I believe I read some time back that they divert resources from the paper system if necessary due to failures, etc. 2) There are a lot of IB users on ET, very, very few complain about data latency. Jack