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Strategies & Market Trends : TA-Quotes Plus -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Clark Wang who wrote (6419)	9/8/1998 9:05:00 AM
From: Robert Graham	Respond to of 11149

I am telling you what I know about Dial beyond any doubt. Just look at other people's experiences here which the post at SI to verify. This is not a difficult thing for you to do. I left Dial over one year ago for bad quotes. As a software developer with significant experience in data communications I am also familiar with their data transfer. I have seen other companies implement this same technology. It is suprisingly good with well over 90% accuracy with only about one to two errors to be found in an approximately 2K file that sometimes can be 10K, based on my experiences debugging customer problems with a product. But this is not good enough for the size of files transfered and that this is quote data that people are making trading decisions on with significant risk potential. Given the latter reason with regards to the money that can be at stake, I think the use of this type of data transfer method for stock quotes is inexcusable. Their focus is obviously not their customer, the user of their service. I suspect this will show up in otehr ways too. You are talking to a person that knows what he is talking about who has been there and done that from both as a user and as a software developer. I think you will be surprised who you meet here at SI. That is why you need to be careful with what you say. Otherwise your credibility can be quickly compramised with making statements such as Dial being the model of a quote service for clean data. Far from it. Bob Graham

To: Clark Wang who wrote (6419)	9/8/1998 8:40:00 PM
From: Gary Lyben	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 11149

Clark etc, We started getting the advances, declines, and volume numbers from a different source on Friday. There were a few that had scaling problems, but it looks like they're all good now. As for the list of issues you named, I researched those, the quotes were bad for these issues because the open was lower that the close, or the close was higher that the high etc. It looks like Friday was a bad day for PC Quote. I checked a dozen previous files from PC Quote, and found from 0 to 4 of these kinds of problems, on Friday there were over a hundred. I had never seen that many bad prices them before. We compare the day's prices to another source the next day, and send the corrections then. Fiday's prices should be corrected tonight. We have been working all day to get procedures in place to identify and correct these errors prior to cutting the price file at the end of the day. We couldn't get everything done today, but it looks like we'll have procedures in place by tomorrow that will catch and correct these errors prior to the 6 pm delivery. It may mean that we slip the time to 6:30 pm instead of 6PM in order to fix these errors. As far as the Metastock update problem that you referred to, it has been corrected, and will be released in the next program update. We should be able to get it out tomorrow, if we don't run into any other problems. Regards, Gary Lyben