Ensign: Comments Please...

Ensign Software

Pros:
- Tons of features/functions for the trader. More than most charting packages
- Great Price
- Good Support
- Help content is excellent
- Choice of data feed
- Software updates almost weekly
- A very popular free online chat service with great complimentary sites, such as dacharts.com

Cons:
- Chart Refresh sucks
- Seems to be constructed using old technology
- No programmable hot keys
- Antiquated Menus/Tool bars (icons are awful)
- Chart windows flash when new bars are painted or you have the option of dirty charts if overlayed by other windows. Crosshairs even dirty the chart. I've never seen this issue in other charting packages.
- User interface not intuitive. Howard needs a UI engineer to improve usability.
- No online forums but pretty good and very popular chat service.

From my experience you may make feature/function requests & suggestions but if they don't jive with the owner's desires or intentions, forget it. As an ex-program/development manager all feature/function requests were databased, prioritized, and considered on each major release. Not with ensign. If it's not going to be done, they'll tell ya.

Ensign is essentially a feature rich package that was developed using old Windows technology, but I use it.
 
Journeyman, your last question is moot for Ensign. "Hyperthreading" and/or "multithreading" has to do with hardware/firmware on a computer motherboard.

Hyperthreading is how data is communicated across a motherboard.

However, if you mean to ask, what hardware interface would Ensign work better under, I would say hyperthreading, because it allows for faster data integrity refresh, and the parity split on the board is cleaner and runs cooler.

The best by far is quad chip hyperthreading, but that is extremely expensive and not cost effective unless you're trading large blocks with lots of liquidity and cashflow because of the maintanence.

Hope that helps

L


Quote from journeyman:

I have hit the wall on the charting capabilities with esignal "advanced" charting.

My number one contender is Ensign and I have some questions that I hope current users might respond to:

1) There is a use of the phrase "historical refresh" on the website - I am worried that datafeed is not genuine real-time?

2) There is no mention of being able to link charts to quote windows. I must be able to have charts linked to specific lists... is this possible in Ensign?

3) How well does Ensign work with Esignal? I have had trouble with Amibroker and Esignal where Amibroker seems to add numerous bad ticks that do not appear in Esignal. Is Ensign the same or is it datafeed neutral?

4) I have seen no mention of multimonitor support on Ensign: is it multimonitor certified?

5) Is Ensign a Hyperthreading/Multithreading application?

Any general comments on using Ensign with esignal as a real-time intraday trading and historical backtesting system would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Jman
More...
 
the last reply there re: hyperthreading/multithreading is so lacking in knowledge that I will only address it by so commenting!

I am hoping to get a trial of ensign - like 2ticks said there certainly ain't no universal medicine when it comes to charting packages but there are some incredibly feature rich aspects that the ensign website promises that I am keen to put thru the paces...

it also sounds like there is no local database save options in ensign like there is with Amibroker - does this mean that the backfill is always limited in size by what the data feed provides? That is one thing I love about Amibroker - it saves all the data locally and simply adds to it. So if you are patient a one month of back fill on ticks soone becomes two, three and on...

I really would like to hear some more comments on ensign... thanks heaps to those experienced users who have already commented - very usefull...
 
I gave ensign the normal 30 day review during an period I was considering esignal, ensign, qcharts & neoticker.

Ensign had some strong charting features that I liked. I did not like having to refresh the charts from the data feed and prefer some type of local caching feature to mimize the update and to do chart work offline. I also thought the user interface was a little tired and outdated.

When I suggested this enhancement to Howard he took a very arrogant and negative position. For some reason he could not understand the benefit of what I was suggesting. Go figure. To say the least I went elsewhere with that kind of response from the owner and developer.

I decided on neoticker from Tickquest. Feature rich, regular updates and enhancements, supports all major data feeds, programmable platform, very reasonable response on new feature requests and bug fixes.

Send me a pm if you have any questions.
 
Quote from sunvalley:

When I suggested this enhancement to Howard he took a very arrogant and negative position. For some reason he could not understand the benefit of what I was suggesting. Go figure. To say the least I went elsewhere with that kind of response from the owner and developer.
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Boy does that sound familiar.
 
Quote from ProfLogic:

Boy does that sound familiar.
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I tried Ensign 3 times and each time found it to be convulted garbarge. Ugly interface, counter intutive UI. NO scanning abilty on a stock list. It is very old technology and was built for pentium II's and 256k ram. Does unacceptable job of handling data.

Ensign refuses to change anything unless he can pile the code on top of the code aready there. For him to bring the code up to date he would basically have to start from scratch. He must make a fortune on it and I don't blame him for not wanting to spend money he doesn't have too.

I have tried them all at several times and settled on Tradestation. It doesn't do anything great but does everything ok and data feed is no worse then any of the others. Plus you can open an account with them them and get it for $100 bucks a month.

John
 
Quote from sunvalley:

I gave ensign the normal 30 day review during an period I was considering esignal, ensign, qcharts & neoticker.

Ensign had some strong charting features that I liked. I did not like having to refresh the charts from the data feed and prefer some type of local caching feature to mimize the update and to do chart work offline. I also thought the user interface was a little tired and outdated.

When I suggested this enhancement to Howard he took a very arrogant and negative position. For some reason he could not understand the benefit of what I was suggesting. Go figure. To say the least I went elsewhere with that kind of response from the owner and developer.

I decided on neoticker from Tickquest. Feature rich, regular updates and enhancements, supports all major data feeds, programmable platform, very reasonable response on new feature requests and bug fixes.

Send me a pm if you have any questions.
More...

You will find Neoticker to be a pain in the ass even more so then Ensign. I tried Neoticker 3 times and I could never get it to work as advertised. I spent all my time refreshing charts.

John
 
Quote from jficquette:

You will find Neoticker to be a pain in the ass even more so then Ensign. I tried Neoticker 3 times and I could never get it to work as advertised. I spent all my time refreshing charts.

John
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Well that is nonsense. I had no problems whatsoever but I will say that it takes some effort to properly install and configure. Once you get over the learning curve it is a rock solid application. What exactly did not work as advertised?
 
Quote from jficquette:

You will find Neoticker to be a pain in the ass even more so then Ensign. I tried Neoticker 3 times and I could never get it to work as advertised. I spent all my time refreshing charts.

John

and

Well that is nonsense. I had no problems whatsoever but I will say that it takes some effort to properly install and configure. Once you get over the learning curve it is a rock solid application. What exactly did not work as advertised?

SunValley
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You are both right...

i have been working with NeoTicker for 6 or more months now and it is a very powerful package... but i did have MAJOR refresh & reload problems too...

This is what i posted in a prior thread...

Very powerful application... you can create just about any custom indicator or system process in .net, delphi, vb, and other languages, etc...

But support is by email only... and you better be very knowledable about your computer and how software works and how to use a help file for every single issue... becauase they do not hold your hand like eSignal... they require sophisticated users...

as to support they have the a similar setup as Sierra Charts ($17 dollars a month) email help and forum... even though they are charging you $100 a month for their software rental fee or $1400 (rounded off up) cost for buying their software outright not counting the upgrades you will pay for in the future...

Also, I have tried calling their support phone number and they do not return your call... their email support comes about every 3 hours or later... so that is something to keep in mind...

powerful product but slow and sometimes inefficent support...

as well as i have a whole thread on NeoTicker's lack of help on a problem...

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=78107&perpage=6&pagenumber=1

To be fair and straight forward... NeoTicker is an excellant product and very powerfull... much better than eSignal's, sierra, ensign, metastock, tradestation, etc...

but you BETTER be very PC savvy... i develop software and toubleshoot it too so i got around this problem finally... but saying nonsense to John is not accurate...

cj...



HAVE STOP <img src="http://www.enflow.com/p.gif"> WILL TRADE
 
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