incredibly frustrating during high volume when quotes lag....how can you scalp in these conditions when quotes from different brokers can differ as much as 30 cents....impossible to know which quotes are stale....
look at SPY...anybody else getting stale quotes? or is a crossed bid and ask not uncommon on AMEX issues? this is ridiculous
how is Interactive Brokers as far as scalping a stock like BIDU? can afford for their to be stale quotes
If you can't afford stale qoutes then you'll have to pay!??! Right?!?! Ain't nothing for free in this world. Esignal is the best bang for your buck... only a couple hundred a month. If you want the best CQG.
If you cant trust your brokers quotes, get a new broker. And while its possible and cost effective to use your brokers feed as data feed always nice to have redundancy. Especially when your brokers feed bugs out. As far as data goes, IB works well in fast markets since its snapshot which in practice only rarely gets a high/low of a bar off by a tick or so. If you're not trading sub 1 min this is probably not that critical. If you're trading second or constant vol this could be a concern. When IB fails its more due to TWS cluster flub than its data. Or some exchange burp. Or your internet. When you want Excedrin free data, gotta pay the piper. CQG is probably the most bulletproof without going over 1k/month for data. There's always Bloomberg. Other than that, ALL data providers will have hiccups sooner or late. Prepare for them.
Mirus's Zen-Fire is as fast as anything I've seen, and holds up well even when the market is flying. M
Interactive Brokers probably has the best datafeed design for volume spikes. Their datafeed is not sent tick-by-tick, it is sent as an aggregate in millisecond intervals. Those tick-by-tick datafeed are more "accurate", but gets jammed when the market spikes. IB's aggregate method delivers the data at the same millisecond interval, regardless of the volume of trades. The purists who want tick-by-tick data smurk at the aggregated data. But really, do you think it would make a difference to your profitability? The debate continues.
TransAct has a sweet feed and it works great with my Ensign charts. Ensign also includes free backfill for most US equties and futures so it's a great combo. Esignal is overpriced crap in my experience. I now get more speed and reliability for free than I used to get for $150/month and it doesn't crap out the instant markets start ripping, either. opm8
zen fire has the fastest es quote I have seen. I have tested esignal, tradestation, reuters, dtn, transact, cqg etc and can't find anything better. Really the only ones I haven't tested are the real expensive ones found on low-latency.com website such as essex-radez and vhayu.