I've gotten NAILED several times over the last couple of weeks, just before the closing bell
with stoppage/slowdown on my DTN numbers. I use watchlists, Time & Sales, and option
chains.

Last instance was YESTERDAY, Tue, 7/31. This was after I'd called tech support last week
and gotten a config change to point me only to the bank of servers that has been upgraded.

So far, this has cost me ~$2k.

Since we're gonna open lower today, this prevented me from getting setup right before
the close yesterday, which means I'll probably lose more $$ today.

VERY UNHAPPY about this. Already started looking elsewhere for a WORKABLE quote feed.

This crap ain't gonna cut it. This stuff needs to work BEST when the market's going nuts,
not just when nobody's trading and nothing's going on.

Some trading accounts have risk management settings to help mitigate situations when 'things get out of hand'.

I can't say if this/these situations are generally DTN's fault in particular, or the market's fault in general, but they happen even to the 'big guys', and even NASDAQ has been known to have slowdowns at the source.

In any case, by experience, I know that traders start balancing positions around 15 to 20 minutes before the bell, and volume charts will confirm that next to the opening bell, the closing bell is the second most active part of the day, and can be 'caveat emptor' (buyer beware) for getting positions covered during the closing seconds.

So yes, there could be technical problems at stake here, but if you've seen market charts for any period of time, they are very messy, and one has to be prepared for situations with the internet, the market data provider, the markets themselves, as well as the broker carrying out the transactions.

Some trading accounts have risk management settings to help mitigate situations when 'things get out of hand'.

I can't say if this/these situations are generally DTN's fault in particular, or the market's fault in general, but they happen even to the 'big guys', and even NASDAQ has been known to have slowdowns at the source.

In any case, by experience, I know that traders start balancing positions around 15 to 20 minutes before the bell, and volume charts will confirm that next to the opening bell, the closing bell is the second most active part of the day, and can be 'caveat emptor' (buyer beware) for getting positions covered during the closing seconds.

So yes, there could be technical problems at stake here, but if you've seen market charts for any period of time, they are very messy, and one has to be prepared for situations with the internet, the market data provider, the markets themselves, as well as the broker carrying out the transactions.

well, here's today's results, clearly still disappointing:


* hosed at opening, had to call tech support, reboot, etc, etc, ad nauseum...
* as a result, had to wing it, using brokerage account for options quotes, which is not
at all ideal.
* got things going fine in mid-morning, thought I was good.
* out of any positions now, can't risk it right now, just watching the tape...
* 7-8 minutes before the closing bell, thought I'd compare timestamps between DTN and
brokerage account...
* SURPRISE, DTN again lagging, about 20-30 secs...not good
* by the time we got down to 2 minutes to go, DTN feed was 60+ secs behind, and stock
I trade was -really- moving.
* with this delay, no way I coulda kept up, would have been chasing prices all the way to
the close.

running on server 66.112.148.227


Guess I'm gonna have to find an alternative quote feed, as this clearly isn't gonna work.

What's probably most disappointing is that DTN does not seem to be adequately addressing
this issue - apparently, has been going ongoing forseveral weeks.

I work in one of the world's largest computer facilities, coincidentally do performance/
capacity planning work on mainframe computers, so I know exactly what DTN needs to
do, and they ain't doin' it.

The answer is to throw adequate hardware/software resources until the capacity is LARGER
than what they need. I've dealt with nickel/dime approach to performance/capacity and
the cheap way usually doesn't work very well, as apparently is the case here.

I'd -still- like to know when DTN is gonna fix this problem. I'm now >4 calls over last few
days to 'tech' support, and no one has a damn clue on fixing this.

Hi AMA,

You may find this thread illuminating: http://forums.dtn.com/index.cfm?page=topic&topicID=1716
It turns out that not all DTN servers lag equally.

What we are doing at the moment (and this is strictly a short-term fix) is to keep track of the difference between the DTN streaming data timestamp and the real time. When this passes a reasonable threshold - which it does every day at the moment - we disconnect and reconnect to another server in hope of finding an undelayed one. This of course would not be necessary if DTN had enough capacity on its servers and a reasonable load-balancing mechanism.

It is an unfortunate truth that data volumes are constantly rising and will continue to do so - despite DTN's chronic surprise - and DTN currently are not managing to cope. They do appear to have an action plan, albeit a little late for your bank balance. See Jay's comments in this thread: http://forums.dtn.com/index.cfm?page=topic&topicID=1734

Another point that may be of some concern to you is that DTN intend to invisibly drop data in these increasingly-common busy situations when their servers experience TCP buffer overrun (currently we all see this as corrupt data): http://forums.dtn.com/index.cfm?page=topic&topicID=1620
It is fair to point out that DTN regard this as a client problem, which we do not accept.

I hope you find the above information to be useful to you in your trading.

Regards,

Neil Brennan

Neil, thanks for the update. This is all new to me, as I've just been a grunt DTN user for the
last several years, but am now trying to do more active trading(not so much on
frequency/volume of trades, but a little more pinpointed, so need REAL realtime data,
not just 'close').

This stuff ain't rocket science, is more a matter of always trying to be on the other side
of the threshold, so as to have adequate capacity. Translation, how 'bout tomorrow's
setup today? However, in most companies of any size today, cost cutting is more
prevalent than ever(how many CIO guys got a bigger bonus by spending more $$?).
See this all the time with the cheapskate outfit in which I work.

Anyways, been very instructional experience, am on the way to finding a backup(or
future primary) feed, so one way or the other, sumpin' will work out.

Too bad, as I'm used to the DTN layout, does what I want, no more, no less, etc.

Didn't realize DTN had a tendency to lay the problem on the end users. Have had one
little quirk on charts(scrolling to previous months/years doesn't work), but after calling
tech support, had decided there must be something messed up on my laptop. Could be
my laptop's ok after all...

Have wondered why some of the config software isn't more user friendly, such as storing
config data in flat/text files, which would be easier to backup and maintain(just today,
had to delete options chains from the registry, which means when DTN recreates it, I
have to spend time reformatting the output windows - kinda primitive way to go).

Ultimately, DTN'll get their act together or they'll bomb/lose in the marketplace.

I'm not all that current on what's available in the market, but compared to when I checked
things out several yrs ago(and ended up going with DTN), it appears there's some pretty
viable stuff out there.

All I want is sumpin' easy to use that works as designed.

Jay, Can you give us an update on the status of the server upgrade?

"Jay, Can you give us an update on the status of the server upgrade?"

Did I miss the response to this question or was it answered privately or still open ?

Sorry, I completely missed the original question. We are still tracking 2 issues with the new servers, and won't be releasing to the remainder of our server farm until they are resolved. Our engineers are spending 100% of their time working on these issues, but the issues are sporatic and we are having trouble getting good debug info that will pinpoint the cause of the problem. We are hopeful we will identify and fix the problem quickly, but it has taken longer than we had hoped, obviously.

---

Jay Froscheiser
DTN - Trading Markets

Tell what you find as an alternate supplier.

I've had too many frustrations.