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The new Ensign supports the Open Tick data feed, which is a free feed, but you still pay for the real-time exchange fees. For example, if you only trade the CME emini exchange, you can have a feed for that for the exchange fee cost of $15 per month.
You would subscribe to Open Tick using the open tick web site, complete the exchange agreement, and Open Tick will do the billing for the exchange fee and remit it to the CME for you. You would also have your subscription to Ensign Windows. Open Tick does not cover all futures exchanges, as you notice on the list shown on this page. But you can have the CME futures, or just the CME e-mini, can the CBOT e-minis, and US Stocks. And you get the various indexes from these exchanges as well.
I do not know how it did. I was focused on programming, and used the feeds for testing changes, and did not pay attention to markets being fast. We will have to gather experience by using it, and form opinions thereafter. Now, I did discover a few quirks about the Open Tick feed, but feel comfortable that Ensign work arounds for the quirks will make them a non-issue. For, example, the daily refresh for futures used Midnight to Midnight as the chunking, instead of globex session open through day session close. So that was giving strange ranges, and open and closes based on the price at midnight, eastern time. Ensign implemented refreshing based on minute charts, in place of their daily refresh. We want the daily bars in our charts to be based on globex session open to day session close, and not on a calendar day. 2nd quirk is similar to the above, that the daily Open, High, and Low for the quote page would be based on the same calendar boundary of midnight. Again, we implemented our own Open based on the globex session open, and the High on the highest since the globex open, and same for the Low. This makes the quote page values match the official exchange values you are used to seeing with other feeds such as eSignal, IB, IQFeed, DTN satellite, etc.
Why Open Tick is based on a day boundary from midnight is strange, unique, and the first time I have seen such an implementation. Open Tick is criticized on their forums by others for these 2 quirks.... and I do not know what other charting packages do about it. Perhaps they just post what they get from Open Tick instead of implement work arounds like I have done in Ensign Windows.
Open Tick has refresh, and that has all been incorporated into Ensign Windows as well, like refresh from any of the other data vendors. There is lots of historical data for ticks, intra-day, daily, weekly and monthly, and that all blends beautifully into the redesign we have implemented for our databases. So, if you have Open Tick, give it a try and help us in our Beta testing. I implemented the futures symbol for the Setup | Manager list to be the same format as used by eSignal and our IB implementation. So the format is root, space, month, year, Example: ES Z7 The new Ensign supporting the TransAct feed in parallel with any vendor feed, such as Open Tick, is a great new combination of features, and should lure some traders away from the products they have used and make Ensign Windows their product of choice. So help spread the word about Open Tick. The more that use it, the more quickly I will get feedback about things needing to be polished off.
If you have TransAct you have real-time CME and would not need to subscribe to real-time CME with Open Tick. TransAct is a broker feed, and with it you avoid all exchange fees. So TransAct is like unto IB in having real-time feed and avoid exchange fees.
The Transact feed has been great from what I have seen so far, and it typically is a split second ahead of the eSignal feed, and has the additional tick trade detail that eSignal is known to have. So there are several low cost alternatives to consider now: IB, IQFeed, TransAct, and Open Tick.
For Open Tick, I implemented the futures symbol format to match eSignal format (and IB format). The index symbols have $ prefix as well, and look to be pretty standard, such as $TICK, $TRIN, $NYA. There are lots of index symbols, and those from exchanges other than the NYSE will require an exchange suffix. The CME indexes will have a suffix of -MT. That does make them different that other vendor index symbols. But the transition should be pretty easy.
Yes, the AMEX index symbols will have a suffix of -A. I implemented the NY stock index suffix of -N as the default, so -N can be eliminated on those symbols. Thus you can use in Ensign $TICK instead of $TICK-N, though $TICK-N will work. I just tried to make it a bit easier for the most common index symbols, which are those form the NY stocks, in my opinion. You can use the Symbol look up form on the open tick web site to see what the exchange characters are, and add these to the end of the Ensign symbol if needed. And as I get feedback, I can try to make Ensign better and knowing the exchanges as a default for commonly used symbols, so the suffix can be avoided. Using a suffix is not that big of a deal, in my opinion, anyway. Continuation Symbols: Open Tick also has continuation symbols. For the Open Tick feed, Ensign implements the continuation symbols, and we will use the eSignal symbol format. On the Setup | Manager form you can enter ES Z7 for the December contract, and/or enter ES #F for the continuation symbol. I am not sure, yet, when the Open Tick feed rolls their continuation symbol, and whether the date for the roll is the same or different than the date used by the eSignal feed to roll the eSignal continuation symbol. Anyway, it is nice to be able to plot the continuation futures symbols from the Open Tick feed. Since support for the Open Tick feed was released, and I see dozens of users have been on that feed with Ensign and I am not getting any negative feedback. The only feedback deals with what symbol is used for some of the indexes, and that is resolved by using the symbol guide on the Open Tick site to look up the symbol, and then in Ensign use the same symbol with possibly a required suffix for the exchange after the index symbol. I encourage users on TransAct and Open Tick to stay current with version updates to have the benefit of any Ensign improvements for those feeds. They are running well, and I am both pleased and impressed.
No other software needs to be installed for Open Tick. Ensign is sufficient to get the Open Tick feed.
For transact you also need the EDS download installed as well. Have you been running Transact OK already?
Give sample symbol you have on Setup | Manager list for Open Tick. I will try the same with you.
The NYSE Down volume is $DVOL. The S&P index would be $IN-MT. I cannot find a symbol for $PREM. Use this form to do symbol look up: http://www.opentick.com/index.php?app=search&event=symbols Last modified 11/27/07 5:38 PM |
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