Well can anyone confirm this ? The OP has only 19 posts , and QT has no announcement on its website. Sounds fishy ...
QuoteTracker To Be Finished End of 2011
- Thread starter garbar
- Start date
I'm not playing games. I asked support for a new feature, they told me they weren't adding new stuff to the program. I told them that sounded bad and the next thing we would hear is the program was going to be discontinued. They responded it was unfortunately going to be "drawn down by the end of 2011."
Put two and two together. No program updates in a LONG time when they used to be done every few days. Website looks like it's stuck in 1998. Those alone should be a pretty good clues this project is no longer being tended and nurtured.
Just wait and see if they do as I've reported. I'll be the first to say I hope someone takes over and keeps QT alive. Then you can say I was pulling everyone's leg. [Why I would do that I don't know. I have more important things to do.]
How does that logic work?
By letting QuoteTracker die Ameritrade hands customers to the competition.
One of the problems that Ameritrade has with QuoteTracker is that the software is so good it shows how crappy the Ameritrade data feed is. Rather than provide a decent data feed they kill off the charting software.
I don't know why they are letting QuoteTracker die. I can only speculate here. Maybe someone in Ameritrade management figured out that once Jerry Medved had left the company, it would require serious resources to support QuoteTracker with all the data feeds and brokers. Ameritrade is a broker; they are not in trading platform busines per se; so, whether licensing QuoteTracker makes maney or not is irrelevant. On the other hand, Ameritrade probably failed to attract sufficient number of short-term traders who would use QuoteTracker. So, if they kill QuoteTracker very few (Ameritrade brokerage) customers will be upset.
I saw a speculation elsewhere regarding why Jerry Medved left. There is no space for speculation here regarding his reasons to leave. It's the standard practice. He sold QuoteTracker for much mor emoney then he had ever expected to make from it. (Otherwise, why sell?) It is a common practice that founders who sell their business keep working for this business for 2-3 years as a condition of the sale. The buyers like this arrangement as it ensures smoothness of transition and the founders have time to pass knowledge, customer base and business contacts to whoever is taking over. This arrangement also ensures that the founders put the business on the right development track. At the end of this agrred term a founder has little incentive to stay. There will be very little money in salary compared to what was paid for the business as a whole. The new owners might not want the founders to stay. Because there is a fixed term, both parties should make an effort so that employment continues.
jeb9999, the point in my post you are quoting is simple. By selling QuoteTracker Ameritrade give an edge to the competition - because QuoteTracker can be used with a number of competing brokers. By killing QuoteTracker they leave competing brokers with their own equally crappy platforms, without an edge of letting traders use a fast clear inexpensive front end like QuoteTracker.
By letting QuoteTracker die Ameritrade stops the competition from letting customers use QuoteTracker.
I fail to see the problem with good software using subpar data. Maybe I don't realise how bad Ameritrade data is.
Yes, can confirm.
I contacted QT support with a question and from the answer it is obvious that they consider QT outdated and not worth to be adapted still.
Why they want to let it die?
It also appeared from the answer that it is a quite big and complex program (written in Delphi) that probably only Jerry understands (they had to ask him as soon as a somewhat not so easy question appeared).
Yes, absolutely.
Probably Jerry is not willing to give support anymore since his obligations to AMTD are expired now after some years since the takeover.
Now what?
Spend another 40 hours reevaluating my reevaluations that I do every couple years.
The choice now is cheesy charts. Cheesy, cheesier and cheesiest.
Spend another 40 hours reevaluating my reevaluations that I do every couple years.
The choice now is cheesy charts. Cheesy, cheesier and cheesiest.
As many well know from my previous posts here on ET, I spent the better part of a year and a half "battling" with upper level management ( not level one technical support guys that are 26 years old) at Ameritrade trying to get them to improve their ridiculously slow data-feed called "streamer". They did not, so I left back in May of last year.
I even pumped in DTN's "IQ-Feed" into QT, but because DTN hasn't entered into the 21st century yet, they only offer Level-One quotes, and not the "open book" of Level-II that is necessary to trade with. As a result, I was still captive to using the Level-II quotes provided by Ameritrade which was most unfortunate. The feed was terribly slow whenever the simplest of buy or sell programs hit the tape. On Fed Day announcements at 2:15pm, the feed was totally useless.
I heard that Jerry Medved was no longer going to be associated with QT and Ameritrade as of June 1st, 2010. When I heard this, I got on the phone to upper management at Ameritrade to ask them if they were going to continue supporting the software . . . a week later they got back to me with an answer, and said that they were not even sure yet. This was back in mid-May of last year.
At the end of the day, Ameritrade doesn't care about letting QT die on the vine because they own Think or Swim and feel that the ToS platform is what "active" traders should be trading on.
This is truly sad, especially when one "demo's" a live version of ToS ( as I did last Spring) only to find out that it seemed to be using the same kind of crappy "snap-shot" data-feed that Ameritrade uses.
When I personally asked the owner of ToS (over the phone) why it is that the ToS data-feed is just as slow as AMTD's, he replied that they "throttled" it back on purpose in an effort to keep the platform "stable" and not overtax the hardware resources (RAM and Processor) of the user.
My jaw nearly dropped to the ground when I heard this over the phone. I guess they think we're still using Pentium 3's with only 1 Gigabye of RAM.
I have no idea if the data-feed has become any quicker at ToS since I "tested" and referenced the platform last Spring. It may have gotten better if they chose to divert some bandwidth resources away from inactive options quotes towards equities ( which I believe was being "tossed" around as an idea to improve the feed, given my criticism back then).
In any event, (sadly) Ameritrade doesn't care about QT dying because they have Think or Swim, which they paid a pretty penny for ($606 MILLION).
That's the bottom line.
