Usually my CyberTrader data feed is one of the most reliable for me... But the past two days (especially today), it was absolutely terrible, and almost cost me quite a bit of money.
I am connected using a cable modem, and have three different quote feeds coming in. I use the PC Quote feed that CyberTrader uses, I have a Comstock feed that I use with RealTick, and I actually get quotes via a BMI cable receiver, which has nothing to do with the internet. So I have pretty good redundancy to check against, from 3 independent sources.
Normally, like I said, CyberTrader is pretty good, but today, from the early morning on, I couldn't get a good feed. The quotes were consistently lagging, the MarketMaker boxes took a VERY long time to load up after I entered a symbol, and about every 15 minutes one of the MarketMaker boxes would just freeze up and quotes would stop streaming. The first time this happened, I didn't realize that the quotes weren't updating at all, and I was sitting in a position that showed I had positive gains, but really it had moved down in price and I was in the red... Needless to say, it is very gutwrenching to find out that you are really losing money when you thought you were profiting, simply because you hadn't realized that the quotes were lagging so far behind that you didn't even have an opportunity to get out.
This persisted all day long, no matter how many times I shut down the market maker boxes and reloaded, no matter how many times I logged off and re-started CyberTrader.
My other two quote feeds seemed to be pretty accurate all day long. Occassionally Comstock took a little longer than usual to load up a MarketMaker when I first entered a symbol, but nothing even close to the delay I was getting with CyberTrader.
No matter how much we want it to be perfect, internet trading is never going to be perfect 100% of the time... But what happened today was horrible, and made it very difficult to even trade. I hope that CyberCorp takes necessary steps so that problems like what we have seen the past two days (or at least what I have seen; can't speak for everyone), doesn't happen again.
***I just wanted to note that these past 2 days have been the first times that I have really had a problem with their data feed... And that I don't hold them responsible for any problems with SOES (it is my understanding that the SOES problem was a NASDAQ issue). *** |
