Kudos - Active Tick is making some moves

[xandman]

To alleviate the typical trader paranoia, it is nice that the recent Active Tick inquiries on ET are not shills since they have complaints like normal people. Though, Active Tick seems to be making moves that will get the notice of the trading community.

1) They are beefing up support. They now have a Live Chat screen. I was pleased how my inquiries were handled. Let's flood them with product inquiries shall we?

2) They are expected to be connected to IBKR and MBT in July. A major development. Too bad it can't drive NT or MC, but you can write an ATS with Javascript.

We have an older thread written by SeattleAlgo though it is probably outdated. Hopefully, one of our budding or qualified HFTers can give it a nice evaluation.

Note: They provide millisecond timestamps for tick data unlike DTN. Maybe this is useful info for some of you.

 

[xandman]

Quote from Stocks and Commodities review:

"Now, if ActiveTick would also consider offering access to equity options and futures/futures options trading and adding a few more broker–partners — well, AT might find themselves with more business than they can handle, especially in these budget-constraining times foisted upon us by the Great Recession."

Try to be patient with support when they announce the IBKR/MBT connectivity.

Additionally: They have options pricing, but no vol or greeks.

 

[activetick]

@xandman Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated! Yes, we're working hard on getting new products out the door. In early July we're expecting to add CME feeds to our offering, and will be supporting the new NASDAQ and NYSE/NYSE MKT data feed standard for nanoseconds. So once these get rolled out, moving forward, we will be supporting nanosecond precision for all of these feeds.

For IV and greeks, we have a project queued up to implement these sometime this summer.

Keep the feedback going, we're listening.

 

[cjbuckley4]

Note: They provide millisecond timestamps for tick data unlike DTN. Maybe this is useful info for some of you.

Just to be clear, IQFeed provides millisecond timestamps on every product besides FX as far as I know. The biggest concern I would raise to those interested in acquiring this data for research purposes is that the data is trades only and bid and ask sizes are not present.

Thanks for the update on ActiveTick. Good to see them adding support for CME.

@activetick I love your pricing, APIs, and the move to cover CME. Any plans to implement depth of market on CME or other exchanges? Also, will you be participating in the CME Non-professional Globex Fee Data Package (fee waiver program)? Your linux support is huge for a lot of us (not me particularly) and the fact that IQFeed nickel and dimes us into oblivion could make you a very attractive option (not that you already aren't, I've considered your service several times in the past, but I ultimately need to CME/Eurex market depth data...I'm sure many many traders don't).

 

[jtrader33]

I've been an AT customer for a few years (they're my back up for IQFeed). Here's my review to this point:

Pros
-Competitive pricing

-Breadth of offerings (Cover just about everything. Historical tick and options data are worth signing up for on their own)

Cons
-Quality control is horrendous in my opinion and they don't seem to care. For example, there are widespread errors in their historical database (sometimes you request AAPL data and get some $12 stock in return, some days are a mix of the stock you requested and another random stock, other data is simply missing, etc.). Back in 2013, I put together a file identifying the affected days and as of 9/22/14 I was told that status is still pending for "this bug".

-Customer service is hit or miss. With issues like the above, you're going to need to communicate with them...sometimes you hear back, sometimes you don't.


Overall, my sense is that AT started as a trading group that decided to make a little money on the side by offering up the data they already had - maybe someone from AT can comment if I'm correct on that? Regardless, it never felt to me as if they were truly invested in the data vendor business and perhaps now that is changing. I hope that's the case and it would be nice to see someone compete with IQFeed for market share. If AT sorted out the data quality issues and were reliable, I'd switch to them in a heartbeat.

 

[activetick]

@cjbuckley4 Yes, we plan to provide depth coverage for CME as well. The only thing is that CME only provides aggregated orders at each level rather than entire order book for each price level. NASDAQ's TotalView feed for example, includes all orders for each price level, so you get a bit more information. But even aggregated books are a lot better than just having top of book quote

We are also considering offering NASDAQ TotalView at some point. Other books are prohibitively expensive for vendors to redistribute unfortunately. We would love to offer books such as BATS, EDGE, OpenView, etc., but the cost to redistribute these is very high.

As far as CME's fee waiver program, yes, we will be participating. The fee waiver would have to be considered on case-by-case bases to make sure customers using the data feed are able to route out to CME for order flow. We are currently working with several brokerages, such as IB, MBTrading, and CQG to establish order routing to execute orders via the API. For the fee waiver to work, the customer would have to be able to use ActiveTick's platform to place orders on CME.

@jtrader33 Appreciate your feedback. We are in ongoing process removing bad apples from some of the symbols in our historical databases. Unfortunately the source of historical data we acquired before had some data quality issues, so are addressing these. Just recently we've hired some additional help to be dedicated to this particular task.

For customer service, feel free to contact us with our new live chat, https://webhelp.activetick.com/chat.php, or our 24x7 email support: support@activetick.com. Our IT group is in process of putting up a forums board at our website, so you will be able to utilize it also for your support questions.

Yes, our company has two divisions, trading and market data vendor. However, these divisions run separately from each other.

This is a great medium for us to engage the trading community, we appreciate ET Please let us know what you would like to see in a market data provider, we will certainly pay attention to your comments.

 

[volpunter]

nanosecond precision for a retail data feed of around a 100 bucks? What would the advantage of this be given most retail users sit a full 100-300 milliseconds away from your data distribution server, lol.

@xandman Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated! Yes, we're working hard on getting new products out the door. In early July we're expecting to add CME feeds to our offering, and will be supporting the new NASDAQ and NYSE/NYSE MKT data feed standard for nanoseconds. So once these get rolled out, moving forward, we will be supporting nanosecond precision for all of these feeds.

For IV and greeks, we have a project queued up to implement these sometime this summer.

Keep the feedback going, we're listening.

 

[volpunter]

I can second that, I was purely curious and checked out their API and the data quality was absolutely crappy. I would not even us this feed if I was paid for it, because it wasted much more of my precious time.

I've been an AT customer for a few years (they're my back up for IQFeed). Here's my review to this point:

Pros
-Competitive pricing

-Breadth of offerings (Cover just about everything. Historical tick and options data are worth signing up for on their own)

Cons
-Quality control is horrendous in my opinion and they don't seem to care. For example, there are widespread errors in their historical database (sometimes you request AAPL data and get some $12 stock in return, some days are a mix of the stock you requested and another random stock, other data is simply missing, etc.). Back in 2013, I put together a file identifying the affected days and as of 9/22/14 I was told that status is still pending for "this bug".

-Customer service is hit or miss. With issues like the above, you're going to need to communicate with them...sometimes you hear back, sometimes you don't.


Overall, my sense is that AT started as a trading group that decided to make a little money on the side by offering up the data they already had - maybe someone from AT can comment if I'm correct on that? Regardless, it never felt to me as if they were truly invested in the data vendor business and perhaps now that is changing. I hope that's the case and it would be nice to see someone compete with IQFeed for market share. If AT sorted out the data quality issues and were reliable, I'd switch to them in a heartbeat.

 

[jtrader33]

Please let us know what you would like to see in a market data provider, we will certainly pay attention to your comments.[/USER]

I'm speaking to equities data as that's my focus, but I'm sure my comments on accuracy/reliability will be shared by the futures guys as well.

1. By far the most important factor is the accuracy of the data you provide (both historical and live) and the reliability with which you provide it (redundant server availability and some mechanism for handling/preventing disconnects in the streaming feed). I can't speak to your reliability (this is IQFeed's #1 strength in my opinion) but (as mentioned) your data accuracy is a major problem. As volpunter said, wrestling with data quality issues is a huge time drain (as well as dangerous). Without this being a strength, any other features become irrelevant.

2. Complete data coverage for a given asset class. By this I mean that I shouldn't have to use several different vendors on a daily basis in order to prepare for the trading day. It's surprising hard to find a feed that offers the following:

-Historical split data (this should include splits for the upcoming trading day)
-Historical div data (this should include splits for the upcoming trading day)
-Historical Unadjusted EOD Data (there are some psuedo-adjusted absurd aberrations out there)
-Historical Unadjusted intraday data (either tick only or both tick/bar)

The above would allow the end user to adjust or not adjust a time series as they see fit. A nice bonus would be to include opening/closing auction prices from the primary exchange along with the EOD data, but it feels greedy to ask for that (can probably get it from trade condition codes in the tick data anyhow).

3. Servers that disseminate market data out of NJ (can be cheap data center other than Equinix, etc.). I imagine your customer base will almost exclusively look to consume data over the internet and the reduction in the number of hops for those running machines in NJ would greatly reduce the likelihood of internet issues (begging ISPs to resolve these issues quickly a few times a year is a nightmare). Additionally, there would be the obvious improvement in latency. Someone is sure to chime in here and scream that latency doesn't matter with an internet feed, but I can tell you from experience that certain strategies work at 50ms but are dead at 500ms. Perhaps even more important, is that this set up should reduce latency variance. I'm in NY4 but I know that speedytradingservers are popular on here, so I'd imagine this would have broad appeal.

That's my list in order of importance. Get just #1 and #2 right and I think people would come flocking.

 

[activetick]

@jtrader33 @volpunter Appreciate the feedback. Yes, data quality is a top priority for us, we've been deploying new ways to detect bad prints, and remove them from our databases. In the past, we stored everything our feed handlers received from exchanges, including bad prints. We've also beefed up our data quality team to handle any reported issues. Customers are always welcome to email our support group (support@activetick.com) with any specific data issue, and it gets looked at right away.

@jtrader33 Ironically, we have both real-time and historical split and div adjustments in our databases, but we haven't exposed these via our API. We'll make sure to pass this on to our product dev team. As far as adjustments, we currently adjust OHLC bar databases, but keep tick data bases intact with original pricing. Out of curiosity, how important is it for you to have access to unadjusted OHLC bars?

Right now, we do provide support for all regional exchanges', as well as consolidated, unadjusted open/high/low/close for the current day. As long as the record is queried before midnight, it remains unadjusted, but after midnight, it gets processed for any splits or corporate actions.

You do make a great point regarding choosing a data center that's closest to you. Currently we disseminate all of our data out of our St Louis data center, but we do have presence in NY4 as well as CH2 that can be opened up to the internet as well.