GENERALISSIMO FRANCISCO FRANCO IS STILL DEAD.. AND SO IS OPENTICK

Yes, I have been MIA lately. But I did want to do an update on my previous blog post on OpenTick. So here is the latest news. Hat tip to Inside Market Data.

If you don’t know who Generalissimo Francisco Franco was, don’t worry, I didn’t either. But he was the subject of Saturday Night Live skit with Chevy Chase that was apparently a running joke on the show. Watch on YouTube.

XASAX NEEDS CASH NOW … OR AT LEAST A SUGAR DADDY

Xasax is/was the parent company of OpenTick, and they have a ‘funding crisis’. Also know a being ‘broke’. Ok, ‘broke’ is too harsh a term. Let’s just say they ran out of money.

They have put their business on ‘hold’ until it can find a buyer ( Sept ‘09 ). I am not sure what on ‘hold’ means, but if I was a customer, I would be looking for another provider.

STILL HOPE

The guy who started OpenTick and Xasax seems to be a serial entrepenuer. He has several domains ( all of which are dead ) , so you never know what he may come up with in the future. The Opentick founder apparently has a couple hundred domains registered, and I only checked a few.

http://quantumarbitrage.net

http://xliquidity.com

http://atsfund.net

http://FreeTickData.com

MAYBE IT IS FOR THE BEST

I cannot really shed a tear for those guys, they were sort of dicks. Back in the day, I talked to them about getting a feed from Xasax for my job.

They seemingly could not answer simply questions about their service, and always wanted to do a webinar. Then they would schedule and then miss the webinar, with an excuse letter a couple of days later. After it happened twice, I gave up on them. They seemed overpriced at the time. I don’t really know if they were because I never had a chance to talk to them.

R.I.P. OpenTick

OpenTick was a inexpensive  financial data supplier. They had been around for about 5 years, and had an API you could use in your software  to access their data. They had a lot of historical data for free and the data that was not free was very inexpensive.

API means Application Programming Interface. It is how computer programs connect to services such as OpenTick or ZenFire.

On 3/16/2009 , OpenTick posted a farewell message on their website. I had used them for a few years, although lately they began to suck. They did have a lot of historical equity option data at the time which is something I needed back then.

I had not noticed because my login was still working ( for the API, not the site ).  They were a great place for free data, but that is not nearly as important as they were five years ago. Still, I had written a client application using them as a backend, which I now have to re-write for IB (Interactive Brokers ). It is not a problem, just a pain on short notice.

OUT IN THE COLD ON MONDAY

They are were my backup service.  As of Friday, any non paying subscribers will be cut off, and paying subscriber have another week to move their apps. You cannot even log into your account anymore even if you are a paying customer by the way.  So if you have any software written to their API, I think you better look to moving to a different API.

When I am running ZenFire during the day and I need to develop on another server, I often used OpenTick for my data source.

XASAX

Their parent company is XASAX or something like that. I really wonder what there people were thinking when they name a company something like that.  Strange names are o.k., but names like this require a pronunciation guide.

I had a sales call with them when I was at my last company. I for some reason, they could not call before or after the market was open, and wanted to talk near the open. When most people are busy. It is not like they are selling shutters or something. Seems strange that a company that wants to serve people who work in the financial industry, but can’t accommodate them time wise.  I think 4 pm EST is perfectly reasonable, they however did not.

I moved my schedule around, and then they stood me up. We rescheduled, but by this time, they were already on my $hit list. We talked, and the sales guy could not give me a reason why my company  should pay 6K a month for his product. Maybe there was something I was missing, but just doing colo for 6K a month seems strange.

I think five or six years ago, their product may have been great, but that was so 2003. The world has changed a lot since then. There are so many places that give low latency feeds and so many people in that space, I do not see the benefit.

And he could not tell me the benefits either. He promised to find more information and follow up, but I never heard from him again. Good riddance,  if a salesman cannot tell you why they have a good product, why you shuould use them or at least follow up, then maybe they should not be selling a $6K a month  product.

CONCLUSION

It was pretty weak to give people two weeks notice that their service for paying customers was going to be discontinued.  They say they are coming back, but who is going to write to their API now knowing they are flaky and could discontinue your service with a two week notice.  Would I want to base my next piece of software on their API’s?  No, of course not.  How does anyone know they will not just do another Houdini and disappear in another few years.

I will stick with IB & ZenFire for now.

Photo Curtesy Of Whipped Bakeshop

To opentick subscribers, friends, supporters, contributors and the rest of the community…

It has been quite a journey for opentick, and for those of you who have been with us for the ride we cannot thank you enough for the support, contributions and guidance you have given us over the course of the last 5 years. We could not have come as far as we have without you.

However, we are sad to say that the time has come for us to close the doors for opentick. However, this isn’t goodbye. In fact, it’s a new beginning. We will be introducing a fresh service with all the bells and whistles we’ve been slaving on over the course of the last year under a new name, a new website and a new level of service. Check back here in the near future for more information about the forthcoming new company and service. Of course amongst all these changes, there are some things that will remain the same – we still aim to provide a reliable free market data service, with an open architecture for a wide range of software platform support.

If you are a current paying subscriber, this March billing cycle will be your final billing cycle; at your next billing date service will be terminated. If you are a delayed or historical data user not currently paying for service, your account will be deactivated as of Friday, March 20th.

Sincerely,
opentick Staff

One day, we shall come back. Yes, we shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to us we are not mistaken in ours.

If you are thinking about using IB ( Interactive Brokers ) for trading your futures trading there are a few things to know so you won’t get screwed hurt.

If you are position trading or cross margining, these problems probably won’t make you lose to much sleep.

Don’t get me wrong, I think IB has some great features. You can trade anything , futures, options, and stocks in the same account. It is a good step up from the pure retail firms like ScottTrade, etc.

So here are the four things you need to know if you are serious about trading futures with IB.

Number 1 IB does not send every trade. What you are seeing is a ‘combined’ feed. Three times a second it bundles up the trades and sends the summary to you. This saves them a lot of bandwith but it costs you accuracy. That sucks. If you are a manual trader, sure , you would probably never notice but computers do notice.

Number 2 Backfill. This is soooo bad you would not believe. Imagine you train and back test your system over historical data. IB sends ‘corrections’  in the live  datafeed up to 30 seconds later. So a price you see for a trade , may disappear 29 seconds later. Horror.

Number 3 Margin for day traders is high. If you are doing short term auto trading, you can control your risk. I don’t think you should be trading with $400 Emini margin ( also crazy ), but I think the margin that IB charges goes to the other end of the scale. They were charging $6K per E mini contract a few months back, which is insane if you are a high frequency trader.

TECHNICALLY this is not an indicator. Yesterday, we posted an indicator that has symbol for AAPL drawn in the lower left hand corner. This indicator helps when I look at the screens from across the room.

Trading can be boring sometimes, so you may not be sitting directly in front of your monitor when something interesting.

The menu bar has the symbol, or course, but sometimes it is just easier to glance at a screen and see what it is. Of course, this one is free over at TraderWerks.

Edwin Sedgwick Coppock developed the Coppock Indicator in 1962 for use on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Published in Barron’s the same year, it was intended to generate buy signals only. The suggested signal was an upturn in the Coppock indicator from an extreme low.

Other interpretations are for a sell signal when there is a higher peak in stock prices but a lower peak in the Coppock indicator. Commodity markets tend to have the opposite behavior when compared to equity markets, with extreme tops and rounded bottoms. Consequently, the Coppock Indicator is better at identifying tops in commodities than bottoms.

I wanted to see what the Coppock Indicator would say about the price of oil. Now it is a long term indicator, but we can still take a look.

THIS INDICATOR IS FOR DAILY CHARTS ONLY. You can run it on any time frame you want, but it is written for daily charts.

You can download this one from TraderWerks.com

Welcome to the new TraderWerks blog. The old blog , was ‘lost in translation’ you might say. No one could seem to find it on the site for some reason, so we moved it here.