It's sort of rendering the tick data much less useful. Is there a reason for this policy when competitors offer it?

Is there a tool that just does live tick capture? I have QCollector but it doesn't do live capture of the quotes, only time and sales.

Hello ArgyleSocks, IQFeed does offer 30 calendar days of Tick data during After Market Hours. During the regular market hours we have 8 calendar days of Tick data. To capture live tick data you would need to use any of the other 3rd party softwares which we have listed on our website at http://www.iqfeed.net/index.cfm?displayaction=data§ion=software . Besides QCollector any of these softwares should be able to pull live tick data. If you have any problems or questions please let us know.

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Curtis Thompson
curtis.thompson@dtn.com
Trading Markets Customer Service
1-800-397-7000 x3614

I don't understand. Does your 30 days of historical tick data include quotes? Or just trades? My point is that I was told that it doesn't include quotes, only trades, which leaves out a ton of important information.

ArgyleSocks
We have 30 calendar days of data available after market hours. 8 calendar days available during market hours. We do not have the bid/ask prices included in the historical data. Our system is not setup for that.

The primary reason we don't offer historical quote (bid/ask) data on IQFeed is due to lack of demand. In the 10 years we have been providing the IQ service, we have received less than a handful of requests for historical quotes (bid/ask). Because quote volume is exponentially greater than trade volume, it doesn't make good business sense for us to store and make this information available when demand for it is so light. As we have explained, DTN does provide this with our NxCore service.

What we do provide in IQFeed is historical trades and with each trade we store the best bid/ask price. This information is sufficient for what the majority of traders are looking for, which is some sort of indication if a trade was matched at the bid or ask price.

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Jay Froscheiser
DTN

I appreciate what you're saying, but if you already have it with NxCore, why not provide a second slow server for people to get it with IQFeed? I need to now go to NxCore and spend upwards of $500/mo plus much more just to add the missing quotes? I am more likely to go elsewhere, which I am loathe to do because I like IQFeed for all other aspects.

I know there are other companies that offer the quotes on a 2nd set of machines that are not available to users unless they ask for them, which limits the bandwidth cost.

I am a little confused myself.
Since I want to switch from esignal to the IQfeed ,can anybody point out the difference of the esignal tick-feed to the IQ tick-feed. Would tick charts look any different?
Thanks

Yes the difference is that you'll get a separate entry with the bid/ask quote for every quote with eSignal *plus* the actual trade ticks (size, price), where as with IQFeed you'll only get the trade ticks, although they're pointing out here that those trades will include the best bid/ask at the time the trade was printed.

I hate to say it since I'm an IQFeed fan and customer, but eSignal has the more proper and comprehensive tick offering, even though it's limited to 10 days back, and IQ goes back 30 days.

Thanks for the info argylesocks,
that's a bummer though.

so, with a 100 tick fdax charts for instance, you get a compressed/shrunken chart with IQ compared to esignal?

IQFeed will report every trade that occurs. We simply do not store every Bid and Ask price change that occurs between trades. We only store the bid and ask price at the time that a trade occurs.