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Strategies & Market Trends : The Final Frontier - Online Remote Trading -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TFF who wrote (7809)	12/6/1999 9:56:00 PM
From: Eric P	Respond to of 12617

I think I read where PC Quote is no longer supporting satellite quotes Eric. => I couldn't agree more! <g> I don't think they've been supporting this customer for months... Actually, they still do offer satellite feed which, according to your earnings release, generates over 50% of their revenue. The area of confusion is with the "$1.4M charge to terminate an old satellite service." To clarify this, during the latter part of 1998 and first quarter of 1999, PC Quote used another satellite vendor/technology which was only capable of 112k bandwidth. During peak trading times (such as every single day at the open and close!), their bandwidth could not support sending out the level of trading volume being generate. To cope with this problem, they decided to continue sending every single price quote, MM update, etc, => at the expense of having their entire datafeed delayed. It was much the same as the current problems with Nasdaq T&S data falling behind these days. => Except, only PC Quote satellite customers were falling behind. And to make matters worse, they didn't even have the common decency to notify their client base of the problem. Too embarrased, I guess. Instead, each customer would individually at some point recognize that their large trading losses and crappy trade executions were actually the fault of their crappy data vendor. When confronter with the problem, they would confess that they have been experiencing problems for ~months and that it would be fixed when the 'new' satellite system was installed. To make a long story short, the new (Hyperfeed) satellite system has been in use since ~2/99. It is able to handle a much higher trading volume without the bandwidth limitation. The only problem is that it seems to go down as much as a few times per day. Sometimes it is only a time or two per week. However, either way, this is too often for a datafeed that people are paying $1200-3000 per month for. Anyway, I hope a slight amount of objectivity shines through in this post, although I'll be the first to admit that I get angry everytime I think about the PC Quote Hyperfeed data. However, I was amused by your quote: "I think I read where PC Quote is no longer supporting satellite quotes Eric." => How right you are! -Eric P.S. While the Nasdaq is up +60% this year, why am I not surprised that Hyperfeed Technology (formerly called PC Quote) is down -75% since April? From my experiences, it's still a good short.