Gary - it all depends on what type of information you use and what level of support you expect when things go wrong.
The best thing about QCharts, IMO, is that they have a very efficient transmission algorithm. If you don't have access to DSL or cable modem, its the only product I've found that can let you monitor 100+ stocks on Level I, 3-5 on Level II along with 1/2 dozen or so charts + a few T&S boxes.
For Level I and Level II stock quotes, while not perfect, QCharts is as good as anything I've seen during market hours. I emphasize the latter because QCharts does not provide reliable Level I or II after hours quotes. The exception are Island quotes which work sporadically before/after hours. They do not provide quotes from other ECNs before/after hours and often time you can't even get Level I quotes on securities before/after hours, particularly listed stocks (i.e. if you want to update your portfolio at 8:00 pm & you want a quote on IBM, forget it; go to Yahoo). Also, if you trade options, they are entirely unreliable. They're quotes are usually stale and inconsistent (Level II varies from Level I, time & sales is just plain wrong too often). Worse, they've repeatedly demonstrated they just don't care and have no inclination to resolve whatever problem is preventing them from delivering reliable option quotes (I doubt they've even tried to identify the problem - much easier to point a finger at the exchanges without bothering to reconcile that with the fact that other vendors don't seem to have those problems).
When they work, their graphs are superb. Their graphing system doesn't offer the range of studies other products offer and you can't graph multiple equities/studies over each other on the same chart (a design flaw IMO) but they do offer the 'major' studies (MA's, Stochs, RSI, MACD, ADX, etc. - see the web site for a list) and, for my style, that's good enough. However, the graphing system has some design quirks in it that lead it to produce gaps in the data and, of course, this may or may not be effecting some of the studies. I've not done the diligence to check this out. Finally, where a few months ago bringing up graphs was not problematic, Quote.com has chosen as policy not to expand their server farms to meet the extra demand for data brought on by the growth in their customer base. As such they now have a 'queuing system' and you can often wait 2-3 minutes for a graph to show up. They, of course, will spin this to be 'your pulling too much data' but, like I said, this wasn't a problem a few months ago and the amount of data I'm pulling hasn't changed. I strongly suspect the # of customers has.
Time & sales is as good as the data they get from the exchanges with the exception of options. Based on what I see on competitive products, the problem is somewhere in Quote.com's handling of option data.
The Island book is a joke. Its one of those things, like options & option chains, that they like to have so they can advertise it but (a) they don't support it (they'll simply point you to the Island web site for quotes rather than try to fix their problem) and (b) its worse than nothing in the sense that the data they present is reasonable but wrong.
They provide 'bar' data, i.e. you can see a limited amount of information about a stock in a specified interval. So if you want to see, for example, OHLC/volume data for the past 300 days or past 300 5 minute intervals, you can get it. But if you want to download it their downloading feature doesn't work very well & they've often expressed their policy that they needn't improve QCharts but rather the customer should purchase an add on product from another vendor - not a large corporation but an individual who may or may not be in business next week - that can handle that task.
They provide a # of 'hot lists', lists of stocks meeting various criteria such as 'point gainers/losers', 'short term up/down', etc. I personally don't use these but some customers find them quite useful and they're the only service I've experienced that provides them. I have no idea if they're accurate or not.
They provide an alert system. The metrics you can set alerts on are quite robust but the system itself is cumbersome and its quite time consuming to enter a batch of limits. I also discovered this week that it doesn't work after hours yet it works pre-market.
Finally, their support is amongst the worst I've experienced. They choose to keep themselves understaffed which leads to long hold times on the telephone. Then you're rolled over to an answering machine after 10 minutes or so and that's a black hole. They don't bother returning those calls. If you are fortunate enough to get through, more often than not, I've not received 'good' or 'correct' answers. E.g. I can find NO one there who can tell me their algorithm for 'Bid' vs 'Best Bid' (2 ways of displaying a stock's bid) and none of what they've told me matches up with the data. When I point that out they say they'll 'look into it' & get back to me. I'm still waiting for those return calls. They provide limited support here and via Onelist but it, too, is unreliable. Its Gibbons' & Jay's little kingdom where they choose who they want to repond to and ignore anyone else. So if you suck up to them, perhaps they'll bless you with responses. But if you don't sing their praises and pay homage, they'll ignore your questions. Their favorite tactic is to tell you to send your question to their data dept. via the help menu. Don't do that. Send an email to data@quote.com. Two reasons: (1) they will deny receipt if you send it the former way (and they pointedly do not give you any sort of case # or audit document) whereas your email system should leave a copy of sent msgs in a folder and (2) they designed their web-based support form to prevent you from including a picture of the problem. Even at that, data@quote.com is something of a black hole. Less than 20% of the items I've sent there have been responded to & the usual response is to wait one to three days and then just claim 'we can't replicate it'. Often times, the problem has cleared up by then which is why they can't replicate it. They've yet to explain, for example, why a gap in a chart exists when I've included a .bmp showing it yet 'they can't replicate it'. And documentation, while it exists, is amateurish and incomplete at best. You can review it on their web site and form your own conclusions. In sum, support is their achilles heel. They claim they're working to improve it but then again, they're known for their rhetoric more than their performance. The only 'improvement' I've seen is where in the past when they had system problems they chose not to communicate anything in a timely fashion to their customer base, now they will sometimes send a timely email to Onelist.
One last thing: every release is a 'beta' product so they can, as a last resort, claim 'its beta, not live, we don't have to support it'. So you have a choice of using an older, presumably supported, version or if you want the latest bells & whistles, you can be a beta tester for them and accept any risk that entails.
In sum, I'm sticking with them only because I can get Level I/II/T&S for Nas stocks fairly reliably in an area where I have no high speed access to the internet. The industry is fairly dynamic & I will not hesitate to switch when/if a competitor can match their transmission algorithms primarly because of the sub-standard support levels they choose to adhere to. Alternatively, I may be moving in 2000 and if I end up in an area with high speed internet access, I will go with another data vendor. |
