does realtick suck, is that why its not listed, or is there another reason? also, I was wondering what happens if you try to swing trade with a direct access broker?...do they get mad at you or anything?
It is listed in the "Software" section and there are quite a few reviews (although not necessarily good).
Realtick had it made a few years back when they didnt have much competition. In fact they were a bit uppity. It wasnt long before a lot of competition showed up and their management could not keep up with the times. I think Esignal took a big chunck of their business. Their data was good when I was using it but that was five years ago. Dont know how they are now.
Agreed. Also, I think that they stuck with an outdated pricing model too long. Their pricing model was based upon (roughly) a ~$250 monthly fee, plus a service charge out of every executed order. The service charge was a ticket based fee of something like $1 per trade, and they had no per share service pricing plan, as I recall. => Once the bubble days ended, and brokerage pricing went heavily towards per share pricing, firms using RealTick could not effectively compete. I'm not sure about their current pricing model, but I think they were a bit too greedy for too long in maintaining especially high profit margins, and their clients went elsewhere. When I last used them (~2000), they had a very good product though. Whatever the history, the owners/founders of Townsend Analytics just cashed out with the same of the company/product to Lehman. P.S. This thread should probably be in the Software section, not the Retail Firms section of ET.
I've been using realtick since 1999, the one thing I can say is that in the past few years they've improved their stability; server outage has been pretty rare lately. And I'm not sure if it's because I'm running realtick on this relatively ancient platform (although my new system just arrived yeehaw), but the way the charts visually spasm the entire screen whenever sudden spike lows or highs are made has repaid my subscription costs many times over.