I've actually began using this a few months ago and they have completely switched their model (for the better) during the time I was using. You now download QuantOffice directly to your computer and connect to a QuantServer instance hosted in ITG and CQG data centers. Since they no longer need to maintain an entire computer instance at Amazon for this setup, it has allowed them to lower the cost to starting at just $200/month depending how many symbols you want to pull the data from their centers. Anyways, I'd like to get in touch with some developers that are considering or already using their cloud service to collaborate on some projects. I'm building a portfolio of strategies..2nd one currently in development. They haven't launched live trading yet but should be doing that very soon.
parliament718, That's great to hear. I'm not a user but I've demo'd the full Deltix product. Please keep us posted on your progress.
Is tradelink a true open source or it tries to lead people to buy vendor service or unlock functions of half open source staff? As you can see, Glean is a big part of tradelink installation and it is introduced after you install tradlink. http://code.google.com/p/tradelink/wiki/TradeLink#Strategy_Development Someone has to pay to unlock the real useful function of it, and tradlink install pack makes it look like it is the only way to build strategy but it is not. So the goal of tradelink now is just leading people to pay?
So we can consider Tradelink is the best open source choice for trading system? Especially if someone can do programming.
Here is what I learn from days of dealing with tradelink: 1. Almost no support. This is basically a dead project, almost no one in the discussion group of official website. There is like 1 message every 10 days or worse. Every message has to be approved and it takes forever. 2. The only guy who is the commerical "glean" guy is the only one answers anything. Most of his answer is "just use glean". Glean is the commercial product that download with tradelink, and you have to pay to unlock. So their plan/his plan is just having no support for open source tradelink, no document, no community even there is one but almost all answers are just "just use glean", then forcing people (well there are almost no people) to pay and use commercial glean with support. 3. As I said, there is no documentation. I have already explained why in point 2. 4. I believe the original goal of tradlink was really few people try to make a true open source trading system, but then somehow it becomes a forcing people to use commercial "glean" trap. Glean itself is extremely poor made and hang all the time, you can try it out then you know. All it does is just asking you to pay. 5. You don't even know what version of virtual studio to use in order to successfully compile stuff. Ask in the official forum? The answer is what you expected: "just use glean!". Check it out if you think I lie. 6. I really doubt the "27,000+ installs worldwide." part. The download count of TradeLinkSuite-3600.exe is just 812 since March 22 (today is May 8), which is extremely not active. Conclusion: This is a good thing to play with and learn if someone wants to build his own system with C#. You have to have good programming skill in order to deal with everything on your own. There are no support and documentation, but the original tradelink (not glean) codes are good places to learn or improve purely by yourself if you are programming expert. It is better than building from scratch if you don't have a full-time trading system developing programming job experience.
Here is number 7: 7. In the official discussion forum, there is a big words at the top saying "Tradelink.org is the most popular open-source trading platform.", I really doubt about this. The most widely believe website traffic ranking Alexa ranks tradlink.org 25,969,449 at this moment, you can always check out the latest ranking here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/tradelink.org# while another open source trading system EclipseTrader is ranked 1,655,620 at this moment: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/eclipsetrader.org# 25,969,449 vs 1,655,620 is very big different. 25,969,449 is almost like no one goes to the website.
I look at a lot of posts in the official discussion board then I come up with number 8: 8. There used to be some tutor videos, basic documents teach people how to build the strategy in C# and compile and use with the true open source part of tradelink, then the developer has deleted all of these, replace with teaching people how to use his commercial "glean". This developer wants no one in the world understands how to use or compile the open source part of strategy building of tradelink and only use his commercial "glean". We can easily tell he would definitely would not update the real open source part, but just use the open source part to get more people attention, and hope some of them buy his commercial "glean". This is such a big trap.