Jim, I've actually never used a DBC product before. This could explain a lot about our different perspectives. :) Seriously, you are evaluating against other Signal products, while I am evaluating against a different, more-mature client-server product.
Yes, I sure it will get better over time. Right now it has a long way to go to match RealTick III, though. I occasionally get the silly idea that I will find something better and cheaper, and so I go off and evaluate this stuff when I see it.
The one thing I can say good about the Signal beta is that the news headlines are very timely (and apparently real-time on the beta). Saved my ass on the initial reaction of oil stocks to the renewal of Iraq oil-for-food. Now, it would be nice if you could get the full news story as well.
The reason why I think that RealTick III works so well is that it was designed from the get-go for client-server. (Though it was NOT designed for the Internet, but meant to be run on a LAN, and there are some problems related to that - it is not very tolerant about errors and connection problems.) DBC will have a lot to learn about how to deliver quotes in a client-server setting.
I do hope that they relax the 200-issue limit. My experience with my own add-on software for RealTick III has been that once you get over, say the top 1000 issues, it doesn't really "hurt" to add more and just follow the whole dang exchange. That is, I can monitor all NASDAQ stocks in real-time without receiving much more data than monitoring 1000, since most of the rest will be inactive. It's probably unreasonable to follow all three exchanges in real-time over the Internet, though, unless you have a fat pipe. (I haven't tried pushing it since I switched to an @Home cable modem, and don't think I want to be that cruel to Intersat's server. :) )
(I had to write my own software to follow n-thousand stocks, since RealTick III only handles 500 stocks in a list. Townsend Analytics, which supplies software for Intersat, PC Quote 6.0, and S&P Comstock on the Net, has a pretty decent development kit which they distribute at no cost.) |
