Oh yes, I was there through all of that... but it didn't impact me much, I could still trade through the glitches. I viewed it as problems with Terranova's servers, not with MBT's connectivity. The same problems were being had by Executioner customers, who work off of the same Terranova server farm in Chicago. I was subscribed to Pristine's Real-Time-Room at the time, and it was amusing/instructive to listen to all of the "X" traders howling at the same time MBT would start to encounter some problems. I was able to trade right through most of that quite smoothly... there were some occasional 1-2 hour windows where I'd have to call in trades, that is what I was referring to in my prior email.
I'm not as dependent on RealTick III, MBT Level II quotes, etc. as many of their customers though... have an S&P Comstock Dish on the roof, 2 other real-time feeds, 2 backup brokerages, three backup charting packages, etc. I never have really liked the RealTick charting all THAT much, compared to the more flexible/sophisticated charting packages I've used... so my primary dependency on MBT is for order-entry & execution. All that I was seeing, for the most part (while many scalp traders howled) was Level II quotes being late, out of sync... that bothers me when scalp-mode trading, but not as much in swing-trade-mode or position-trade-mode. I trade about a third of each, depending on the market environment. When the market is strong like early this year, I generally am riding em', because I make more that way (my next TigerInvestor.com article is on how to determine which mode, which is the hard part <G>).
True, there was some finger-pointing going on. I still don't understand how late quotes and price glitches can be caused by a router... looked like a server (Terranova) issue to me. I have a bit of experience in this area ;), but am open-minded to being wrong, since I don't know their network. But, they have some very good networking/operations talent at MBT, I'm sure they have their reasons and rationale. And keep in mind, Terranova is a relatively powerful entity... might explain things.
Good trading, -Steve |
