Are you using the data from Interactive Brokers through TWS. If so how many quotes do you normally use and how good is it? I have systems that I need to get a large number of quotes for and I am wondering if I can do it with the data from IB. I am thinking about writing a Java application that connects to TWS and cycles through symbols as necessary to get quotes for all the symbols of interest. TWS is limited to 100 quotes and I could be watching over 1000 stocks on some days. Many of the symbols would only need to be checked a couple times a day, others would need to be streamed if close enough to entry. Has anyone else used IB data for systems trading on hundreds or thousands of stocks? Are there any alternatives that I should consider? One limitation is that I want data for foreign exchanges. I have looked at eSignal but they seem to make it very hard to use the data outside their application.
IB market data is okay but not very good. Note that it is also not true tick-by-tick datafeed. It is a snapshot-type of datafeed (the timeframe is about 0.2-0.3sec). If true tick data is what you concern, IB is not what you want. You would want to pay for third-party datafeed.