Ok I have written a simple application to NxCore and I have some comments. NxCore gave me a demo. The first thing that you notice is that this is not a retail type feed but an institutional grade feed. You don't subscribe to symbols and there is no symbol limit. You get an entire exchange and it is up to you what to filter out for your application. They do have ways to send you particular exchanges, but AFAIK that is the level of granularity of the feed. Otherwise, they do have granularity within the feed and it affects pricing. In order of rising expense, you can get just trades, NBBO, or regionals. The demo time they give you is very small, on the order of a few days, but here is the interesting part. The application saves the "packets" to a file for the entire day. As you will see later, this gives you an indefinite demo. The API is included with the feed and it is not an extra cost. It includes a C++ and a C# wrapper program. Both worked flawlessly. The documentation is expansive and clear. The application set includes three tools: NxCore Access, an application called "Viewer" which you can use to "replay" and inspect individual "pakets", and an IM tool that allows you to talk to the developers and tech support. The Access application is a sort of control center that displays all sorts of information, and allows you to control your experience with the feed. The Viewer is a visual inspention tool that allows replaying and visualization of data structures of stored data. This capacity to replay data and inspect data in effect gives you the ability to continue development, since you can replay the data indefinetly even after your demo ends. In case you didn't notice, this also gives you a local historical data store for future trading system analysis. If a packet is dropped or an error occurs for any reason, the program will automatically work to get all the data stored. The interface to replay that historical data is the identical interface you use to go live, so you don't have to write two different programs. Another really neat thing about the set of tools included is that you have this "Viewer" that while you are replaying the data, it allows you to visually inspect the data structures that contain the data. The representation uses a split screen, with a Listview/Treeview on the left and a pane on the right that displays the particular field you clicked on the left pane. This works well, so that if the structure contains a pointer, you can drill down (click on the plus or minus to open or close on the tree view on left) into those strcutures as the tree expands. The Viewer allows you to single step through the individual message data and inspect fields. This makes learning the API extremely simple, since you can compare what your application is seeing and what the Viewer is seeing. One final feature also really helps, the Viewer allows you to filter what type of messages, exchanges, etc you want to see, so you can concentrate on what you want and get up to speed quickly. Finally one really neat thing is that you can get this data over the internet. So if you have a relatively fast internet connection, like say 16M down and a decent up, you can get this data without having to colocate or get expensive Inet connections. This is huge to the retail people that don't have the means or expertise to colocate or afford expensive point-to-point lines. On performance, I have not done a scientific study, but they seem to be on par at least with Activ, and probably well better. They claim to have numbers that show they blow away Activ, but I have not done the study myself. I have two beefs with NxCore. 1) This is not so much a beef as an observation. Their pricing is out of the league of 98% of retail traders. For example, if you are not a pro, and you want NBBO OPRA and NBBO ECNs over the internet, that costs $2500/M plus some minimal exchange fees. That is waaay tooo high. They need to get that under $1K/Month, without sacrificing anything you get today. 2) If you do have the means and want to colocate and get NxCore data as fast as possible, it is somewhat dissapointing, as they currently only distribute data from Chicago. So if you are interested in data that originates from NY, and you colocate your machines in NY, you still have to connect to the NxCore tickerplants in Chicago. This is unnaceptable for institutions. NxCore has to get a distribution center in NY ASAP. Overall, NxCore is an extremely exciting new offering well worth watching and I strongly recommend demo'ing it if you understand the limitations stated above. If you research other feeds that in theory compete with NxCore on an institutional level like Activ, Spryware, etc, you begin to understand why NxCore has a very enticing business plan. As far as retail traders, while the fact that you can get nearly a direct exchange feed over the internet is bleeding edge idea, the pricing is way out of their league.
THat was my realization too. Plus, sorry, their sales suck. I got repeatedly dumped into their spam folder and was UNABLE to get a demo. I am NOT running behind people to pay them hugh amounts on top. For futures, I was quoted 500 USD For CME / CBOT + exchange fees. That is a LOT more reasonable than the OPRA fees you quote, but STILL quite a lot. I think their are quite a bit stuck in the past (high internet costs). Anyhow, the offer is REALLY interesting.
Well, I refuse to make international phone calls just to get a demo The emails from me got regularly marked as spam. The emails from THEM, too - happens "putting something into the subject line" was not part of their way to do emails.
Thanks Nitro, this is the kind of input I come to ET in the hope of still finding, and occasionally do.
HI Nitro, That's a very helpfull summary. Thanks. I have a question about the pricing. Did you get any price offers? I am interested in round 1000 quotes from both NYSE and NASDAQ. From my calculations, it should be around 120-150$/M. Thanks, Eyal
eyal, read his post again. they don't offer that. they send you the whole exchange. all or nothing. count on1k+ to start. thanks nitro, your comments echo what i've heard from friends. regards.