Oct 10, 2007

Prophet price increases

Just received a friendly customer service call from Prophet letting me know that their rates will be increasing and if I wanted to 'lock in' to a lower rate than what I'm paying now for 1 or 2 years. I asked what the rate increase would be and he said from $29.95 (my silver membership) to $45 a month.
 
I've actually been thinking of canceling my membership because of a) all the reliability issues with Prophet lately and b) I think I can get my candidates from Briefing.com's gap list (provided by Jamie) and my IB scans.
 
However, I currently use Prophet as my intraday data feed along with my data provider for backfilling. After hanging up the phone, I went over to IQFeed to check in on their data rates. I may be calculating incorrectly, but I think they want to charge $32 a month just for data. Is this correct? I remember signing on with them for a trial run in February and it was only like $10 a month plus $3 for the exchange fees.
 
In any case... if anyone has a good option for a data feed. Please pass along.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

I use TD and/or etrade, which is free if you have an account there.
But TD limited to 75 symbols and etrade is 150.

They both work pretty well with QT.

-Min

Anonymous said...

Etrade does not have a backfill. TD does but only 5 days. (200MA invalid on 15 min chart)

Prophet has a 10 day backfill.

Anonymous said...

I thought you had prophetstream and Silver. I have Silver which includes the 10 day backfill and I use Etrade for the data which is free.

For $299.50 a year, I might lock in for a year. The main thing for me is the 10 day backfill.

OONR7 said...

gt: I think it's more like QT only goes back 10 days. If you open a chart directly on the Prophet website, you can go back 120 days with intraday data. Pretty cool.
Thing is... if I'm ready to leave prophet's scans, then I'm only staying for the backfill which would essentially be $30 a month.
Now, TDAmeritrade is another option as I see QT has them as a backfill option. Also, QT is free for TDAmeritrade members and I thought Trade-Ideas was also included. I'm checking on that.
Trade-station is another option but I'd have to find out if they have an scanner and backfill.

Anonymous said...

Trade Station ? You mean changing to their platform ?

Tom T. said...

oonr7 or anyone - what is the need for more than 5 days of backfill for the type of daytrading you are doing?

I have not seen anyone mention getting some type of edge to their trades by spotting resistance or support areas beyond 5 days of backfill - Do you really need all that backfill? If so, that would be a good topic to post on as I have not seen much discussion on the use of backfill for trading gaps - Tom

spread said...

If you use the Think Or Swim platform you have Prophet for free aswell and you can use their scanners for free. The scanners are more are less like the scanners from IB.
TOS is more for optiontraders but they have some nice wistles and bells on their platform.
Stefan

Jerry said...

OONR7,
I use Stockwatch for $14.95.
Go to quotetracker website and redirect to special page.

Anonymous said...

Tom,

A lot of people use the 200 SMA on the 15 as an important area. Pristine.com for example. Your 200MA is not valid with just 5 days of backfill. And yes, some of us look that far back for support and resistance. If you look at Jamie's trading (traderjamie.blogspot.com) he looks back further than 5 days for support. You can look at the daily but sometimes it is a lot easier to look at lower time frames (10,15,30...) Now if your style of trading does not use the 200MA and you are doing well just looking 5 days back for support, keep doing what you are doing :-)

Anonymous said...

NR7,
There were 39 Briefing premkt. I went with >$10 naz/ny with the most % +/- at 5min into open or 15 stocks and added 4 Scottrade Best Performers most %/pts from Scottrade also 5 min into open or 19 stocks. Best were: chnr qxm bcsi(Scottrade) cost dsl(S). Of course the others had good moves. If one just went with the Briefing gap ups >$4, add: seed fmt. Not bad!!
Scalped CSUN 2/5" IB, and almost PETM 2/5" IB reversal. Alot of potential with those Premkt's, imo. I like the Scottrade Elite Platform charts with 1 min to 10yr monthly. $7/trade. Good fills, a bit slow on the NYSE. Trade Ideas free, good layouts, research, news, bla bla. I'm happy with them and they are right down the block.I use yahoo broadband. DSL looked good -9/15 or -4/30. I think it's easier to make the decision to go long or short before the market and put the energy and focus on a small WL looking for continued direction or reversals. Specialists make more $ than general practioners. Sad to say.

Anonymous said...

Of course one could just play the top groups like Solr and shipping. The higher priced ones(36) had an ATR of over 3 today, not including all the reversals! And you don't have to bother with al the prep work. Many many IB Hammers Doji. TBSI 2/15

Anonymous said...

..or my China WL of 86 had 23 over +4%, or 27%. Amazing!

Anonymous said...

i am trail on IQfeed. its like $20 base and $4 per exchange for fees. i dont use AMEX, so i think thats $28; but i get the Philly Inxexes for $4. i get the L2 feed, so its like $20-$25 more. i also get IQCharts(different from IQFeed, which has a gap list, but the feed is slow & the gap list is junky - its $49 or so a mount, but the charts go back many years & are easy to use for swing trading.

i may checkout Scottrade for a scanning list - im waiting for new scans that are supposed to come out on Trade Ideas, so im in limbo. Realtick has the scans i want, but they are pretty expensive.

elitetrader has rating on brokers & services.

OONR7 said...

thanks everyone for your suggestions. I'm going to give IB a shot and see how it performs on a day-to-day basis. I'm happy with their scans so far and the top volume stocks and movers are usually included. If I can find a trading platform such as TD Ameritrade that I can open and just put a small amount of funds in... I may look into that.

LP said...

TS actually would be pretty good for your style. If you trade 5K shares a month, you get the platform and their scanner for free. Plus I have your Fib code all ready for you :) Also it real easy to code all your stuff regarding volume, IBs, hammers & hangmans. However, it will cost you $.01 a share and while it may not sound huge it will add up. In addition I like the bracket trading options. Real easy to place entries, stops and targets in one click. Thus if your internet crashes, your stops are placed if your entry order is placed. IB has this in the DOM.

I myself have used some of the automated trading concepts and for this TS sucks. While you can do a lot in TS, it's not enough. For one, you can only scan on one time frame at a time. Basically you have to scan on the weekly, manually change the setting to daily then manually change the setting to intraday. Also, they don't have stop limit orders in the automated trades. They do have it for their manual trades. So I've been looking into NeoTicker which connects to IB & MB. I can code my scan on multiple time frames without having to change any settings. It can also place auto trades for me from the scanner window. In TS you have to open up charts and place your strategy. And depending on the strategy, this may be too cumbersome. Also NeoTicker would allow me to place Stop limits through the auto trade. However, for you Oonr7 this may not be a necessity right now. I like it because I can auto trail my trades if I have to step away for any length of time. It also helps me stick to my rules. The more specific your rule set is, the easier it is to trade with TS. No hunting for stocks etc. Code your rules and the trades come to you.

So in a nut shell if you trade 5K roundtrip, and don't mind the $.01 and aren't looking for auto trades, TS might just be for you. As much I hate TS for their slippage (if you don't use Stop limits), I will say that their data is cleaner than that of esignal or iqfeed. It's a very nice package for traders that don't want to automate thier trades and best of all it's free if you trade 5K shares a month.

LP said...

And Suze Orman is still my hero

OONR7 said...

lol... you should send an email to Suze. Thanks for the info, really does sound like a great platform and last year I went through the process of opening an account and before it was funded I had access to the platform. Intimidated the crap out of me. So much so I canceled the account. Anyway, it does sound interesting but the .01 per share is almost a dealkiller. I mean, once you go .005 a share, it's hard going back.

LP said...

I hear ya. .005 is sweet. Keep in mind that it's .01 for the first 500 and I think it's .005 for anything above 500. However, if you do switch I'll help you in anyway that I can.

OONR7 said...

thanks FW.