Mar 4, 2008

Data issues... again

In December, I opened a TD Ameritrade account just to get access to their data (for backfill purposes). Well, everything had been working fine up until the last two weeks. In that time, the data has been off - just on select stocks - about 6 times.

Now, that may not sound like much, but with my style I absolutely rely on the accuracy of the information... where candles close, the opening range, lower/upper tails, etc. Of the six stocks I mentioned, I entered two of them based on bad data... data that - if correct - I absolutely would not have entered the stock and lost money. Yesterday's BA and Friday's MLNM trades are just two examples. On the flip side, there were opportunities that I missed because the data was wrong that I know I would've profited from. Fortunately, the data's been correct on my winning trades and I've been able to 'deal' with the problem. So... what to do? Well, I noticed prophet.net's info was correct and I will be using them from now on until I discover a problem, I guess.

I've posted here before asking for your input on data feeds but I really don't think there's an absolute solution. Most folks use IQFeed, as did I last year, but I found their data incorrect at times as well. I would ultimately like to use IB's backfill as I use them for my intraday data feed but their backfill sometimes doesn't work or takes too damn long. I may just have to verify data with both TDAmeritrade and Prophet before entering.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

i also use TD, it seems to be the fastes of all backfill services.

OONR7 said...

trader a: while I care about speed... I care more about accuracy.

Unknown said...

Did you try esignal?

OONR7 said...

hammer: I'll check into esignal (but if I remember correctly it was very pricey). I signed up for marketfeed.com's service and I'll try it for a month.