Hi guys, I just wanted to start a thread that compares these 2 products, and spurns some debate over their merits/flaws. I am an equities Day Trader, who trades listed issues only, and who uses RealTick Pro Plus. Although I don't use an overabundance of RealTick's charting capabilities, I went for Pro Plus since I needed to subscribe to this level of service in order to get NYSE Open Book. I pay Townsend Analytics $ 260/mo of RealTick Pro Plus, and I pay the NYSE about $ 54 per month for NYSE OB, for a total of $ 314/mo. The features that I use the most on RealTick are: - Time and Sales - Market Maker (both Montage (inclusive of regionals) and NYSE OB). - Ticker - RSI chart I tried eSignal 7.3 several months ago (comparable product feature set) and paid a grand total of around $ 180/month - significantly cheaper. However, due to some dislikes that I had with eSignal, I have decided to stay with RealTick for now (see below), even though eSignal's interface is significantly slicker. I would love to hear from people who have used both products, and would love to hear about the things that they like and dislike about each. Here are the things that bothered me about eSignal: 1) I have built elaborate spreadsheets using RealTick's DDE API interface, based on their Level I data. I use these spreadsheets as my screening tool. eSignal has an equivalent DDE interface, so I converted my spreadsheets over to use them. Lo and behold, on eSignal, I found many instances where the Level I data was not in synch with their Level II market depth data - only for illiquid stocks. This drove me crazy, and happened many times. 2) Which leads me to problem # 2. The telephone support is very bad. Had to wait on hold for almost 40 minutes once during the trading day, and when I finally got through to someone to complain about specific instances where the data was out of sync (problem above), the guy on the phone new nothing at all. Very poor customer support. Contrast that with RealTick - I never seem to wait on hold more than 15-20 seconds, and a good number of their staff is knowledgeable. 3) I have dual internet lines at home (broadband and a backup dialup line), both of which are always active. If my primary line fails, RealTick always detects that, and automatically transitions over to my secondary line. With eSignal, if my primary line went down, the application would attempt to re- connect on my other line, and I would get a "DUPLICATE ID" error, that would prevent my connection. I had to exit the app, and re-start to get it working. Hence, eSignal's failover algorithms are inferior to that of RealTick's. 4) You may think this is stupid, but RealTick has an audible indicator that can be invoked, any time the book changes on the market maker screen. I have become totally reliant on this indicator to alert me to a change. eSignal does not have this - I requested it as a feature improvement. I found it very hard not to have this indicator around.
I have used both, and prefer the graphics layout of REALTICK over E-Signal. I can also confirm your experiences with tech-support in that I have rarely waited more than 15-20 seconds for a tech-support person to pick-up the phone at REALTICK. The charting package of $165 per month which inlcudes all equities and E-Minis is perfect an add on package to your trading platform. Right now, if you pay one year in full, REALTICK gives you a discount down to $135 per month. Offer expires at the end of this month.
For what it is worth, WLD3 will support RealTick from next week onwards, so this will allow you to do backtesting and a few charting styles that you usually have to pay for. Volker