First off, I would like to appologize for not posting more quickly with an update for everyone regarding the recent delays that have been noted within the US Futures Exchange feeds. 100% of my time, as well of the time of our Quote Engineers has been focused on what the cause of this issue is/was, as well as the best course of action to take to resolve it quickly and permanently.

As was posted earlier, we put new hardware in last Thursday, March 3 to increase the throughput processing capabilities in one of our quote handlers. Friday, we continued to see delay issues within that system, which was identified as a configuration issue on the hardware that was installed the night before. Changes were made mid morning, which alleviated the delays for the remainder of the day Friday. On Monday, we didn't see any delays in our quote feeds. Then, on Tuesday, delays were again seen.

Because CME and other electronic trading volume continues to increase at a rapid pace, we felt the best solution was to dedicate hardware to its processing and separate it from the other futures exchange feeds. This hardware was installed Tuesday afternoon between the Emini trading sessions.

Today, we have not seen any delays in our feeds.

Our Engineers continue to work to ensure that the hardware and network in place is sufficent and properly monitored. We don't anticipate any further delays or problems with the feeds.

We are completely aware of the importance of providing you a highly reliable, and fast quote feed and we will continue to do everything possible to earn your continued business.

---

Jay Froscheiser
DTN Market Access, LLC.

Thank you for providing the forum with a response to posts concerning the recent data delays.

A suggestion was made that would greatly enhance customer value, as this is a problem that can arise again, be it DTNs issue or not. My trading platform has a feature inwhich a flag pops up in the corner of the monitor when there are data feed integrity issues. This at least lets us know that there is a delay.

Additionally, based on conversations I had with a number of customer support people, I understand that there is no internal "alarm" that notifies DTN that there is a possible problem in data transmissioin. The customer service people only became aware that there were problems due to customer calls. It seems that this would be a relatively easy step to take, so that when we call in to verify the problem, we are told that you are already aware of it and are working on it, and not that it is the CMEs fault.

As I am sure you would understand, it doesn't give me a warm fuzzy to hear that a problem of this nature came to DTNs attention through customer calls. Thanks again for the response, and hopefully these are suggestions that can enhance the overall customer experience.

---

Tradinoncoffee

I too want to thank Jay for his candor on this matter.

My second feed is Interactive Brokers which flashes a red bar (clicking on it opens a window which displays the specifics of the "trader warning"), but even their system is far from perfect. The recent problems at CBOT it took several minutes before IB notified its customers of the problem, long after my application had detected a problem.

Hopefully we will see the second resolution added to IQ in the near future. If implemented correctly (exchange time stamp) this will go a long way toward those who use the API to detect an exchange, Internet communications, and/or IQ problem.

Those of us who were trading back in October 1987 remember when the data feeds from the exchange were running 30+ minutes slow, and executions were getting filled no where close to what the quote machines were telling us. Things have come a long way since then, and we expect quote vendors to have split second accuracy, but it's not always possible, or even within their control.

The long & short? (no pun intended). I suspect some of us will always be able to detect a problem before the quote vendors can detect, verify & report it. But I would welcome any message via the API which advised customers of an exchange, server, or other issue.

All good suggestions, and all things we have thought about here as well. tradinoncoffee...I assume you are also using CQG (we have displaced many CQG units with our ProphetX platform recently) which provides the notification. We have seen this, and are currently researching the best way to implement this type of notice. One of the issues that has kept us from doing it was the fact that, if delays are due to local or general network congestion, we didn't feel good about sending additional messages which could compound the problem. I am starting to see that the benefits would outweight this possible downside.

As for customer support, there may have been a little mis-information. Our operations staff DOES have monitors within our systems. We are able to monitor latency within our systems, and alarms go off when we are outside of threshholds. However, it IS a manual process for our OPS staff to notify customer support when there are delays. Because of this manual process, they often don't know about the problem until after "some" calls are received. Keep in mind that these monitors won't do much to tell us of an exchange delay (that requires us to be notified by customers, then we call the exchange to confirm). Also, our current monitors are internal monitors. We are looking at bringing in some outside "retail" bandwidth (like a cable/DSL connection) which will allow us to create monitors that better match the experience our customers see (and takes into account global Internet connections).

We are driving home new initiatives to our entire staff, and its called QUALITY. We define Quality as Speed, Reliability, and Cleanliness. In nearly all cases, we are on par and often better than our competitors (we wouldn't be knocking out as many CQG systems if this weren't the case). However, "nearly all" isn't good enough. We have a great opportunity to continue out-performing the competition because many vendors are having major issues due to the increased throughput the exchanges are requiring. We have some system improvements in the works that will allow us to keep ahead of these increases, and hopefully continue to keep ahead of other feeds (thus giving you a trading advantage).

---

Jay Froscheiser
DTN Market Access, LLC.

Thanks again for providing some feedback and lifting the shroud of mystery on some on DTNs internal mechanisms for ensuring quality data throughput as well as the company's focus for improving in this area.

Great idea for bringing in the "retail" feed for comparison to your output. That would enable you to notify us as well if delay is due to internet issues vs. DTN issues.

As for exchange delays, I trust that you communicate the same concern to them regarding timely notification of data problems as I, and others, are asking DTN to provide us with. Would also like to see exchange notifications that come to you sent to us as well, possibly using the flag idea.

Anything, and everything, that you can do to notify us that there is a problem and what it may be due to is a HUGE benefit to those of us who trade at the money, regardless whether the source is the exchange, DTN or the internet. Knowing when the charts we are looking at differ with the actual market is critical, any form of instant notification will be of great value to us, and a great feature of your service to future customers as well.

Additionally, notifying your front line customer service people of all matters seems to be another area for focus. Even today, when clarifying that the ES# continuation contract had been rolled to the June contract, the customer service area was in the dark that a change in procedure had been implemented there as well. By the way, Thank You for the continuation symbols...and encourage you to adopt the markets convention to roll them on the evening of the 8th, as it seems the bulk of the volume shifts to the new contract on the 9th.

---

Tradinoncoffee

Tradinoncoffee:

I'm no expert on the exact timing of the roll, but I do check in the morning during expiry month to make sure my app is tracking the most active of the ES, NQ, and YM contracts. It appears to me that the shift from Mar to Jun occurred during the day on the 10th.

http://www.cme.com/daily_bulletin/Section11_Equity_And_Index_Futures_2005046.pdf
http://www.cme.com/daily_bulletin/Section11_Equity_And_Index_Futures_2005047.pdf

I've never tried to track if the roll occurs on a particular day of the month, or if it's more closely tied to something like "Thursday before expiry week". Beats me. I just have a pop-up which bugs me every morning of expiry month until I change the contract specifics.

nsolot,

Thanks for the links and the idea. Just glad that DTN has the continuous contract moving forward. Should be all settled in by the time the next rollover occurs in June.

It just seems from talking to other traders using different feeds that their data providers are rolling theirs the evening prior to the Thursday 2 weeks prior to expiration.

---

Tradinoncoffee

Looks like DTN is still having either the same issue arise or a new one has cropped up regarding the issue of delayed data. Several times this morning, data was delayed. At least customer service was aware of it this time and was able to confirm it.

Hopefully this gets resolved soon and DTN incorporates some sort of flag notification. Another trader noticed my charts were off before I did since their data provider was staying current is how I became aware of it.

---

Tradinoncoffee

I noticed this too today. I use IQFeed with Medved QuoteTracker and noticed that IQFeed lagged behind the MB Trading Futures data from time to time. I was watching /ER2M5 and @ER2M5 and @ER2M5 was lagging pretty noticably.

happening again right now

CBOT YM really down now, not just delayed.

Jay???

on the IQ system, CBOT and some CME is down. Our Engineers are looking at it to see what is happening as it is only effecting our IQ systems.

---

Jay Froscheiser
DTN Market Access, LLC.

Don't know if this is any help. YM appears to have gone down for about 15 mins, while ES only 5 mins. I can provide time stamps if you want them.

Both ES & YM are reporting about 3,000 contracts behind the IB volume stats now that the feeds are back up.

Todays issue was on our live server system and resulted in outages on both CME and CBOT. The gaps will be filled in with data from our backup systems this evening.

We also have placed an order for an additional 11 servers in an effort to stay ahead of the increased market volume that continues to plague many data vendors. In addition, we have code currently in QA that will significantly improve performance of the servers, as well as adding much of the feed enhancements customers have been requesting.

As I have said in earlier posts, 100% of my focus and that of our development and operations staff is to ensure we are providing the best datafeeds available. I will do my best to keep our customers updated as we progress in rolling out additional hardware and software.

---

Jay Froscheiser
DTN Market Access, LLC.

OK....Jay, and any other DTN Management that is watching this forum...enough is enough. Your lagging data feed actually COST me money today since I had no idea where the market actually was. Oh, well, yes i knew where the market was because somehow CQG was able to deliver timely and accurate data to my trading platform. So no cheap shots, Jay, about CQG anymore and about how you are taking away customers from CQG. This has been going on for several weeks now, and for several weeks you have been posting, and we have been hearing from customer service, about how this or that is the issue and that this or that is being done to fix it.

It is when the market is actually moving that we depend on timely and accurate data. Otherwise, any old data provider will do (carrier pigeon??). So please, clean it up!

---

Tradinoncoffee

Well Gentlemen ,
A stellar day in the markets unfortunately DTN completely dropped the ball. From about 2:20 to about 2:56 my dtniq was behind 1-2 minutes. The data seemed to completely stop at times. Now I don't expect any data provider to be 100% during the crazy after FED announcement trading frenzy...but it would be nice to be at least within in a few ticks. But 2 points behind?!! I trade the ER2 and it was untradable with the delayed data provided this afternoon.

I also use CQG for my trading platform and they seemed to keep up. I sure hope the servers you have ordered are maxed out on ram (say 3 gigs) and you have a rush order on them. To miss major market movement like this is very costly as this is not a hobby for me but the way I provide for my family. I look forward to once again receiving timely data from you in the very near future.

Please see this post: http://forums.dtniq.com/index.cfm?page=topic&topicID=494

---

Jay Froscheiser
DTN Market Access, LLC.

Completely agree Tradinoncoffee... The datafeed lagged for over 40 minutes today after the FOMC interest rate announcement. There were times the price lag was over 1.5 pts. behind on @ER2M5. Quite frankly, this datafeed lag makes it almost impossible to trade and is totally unacceptable!

Like you, I have CQG trading platform and their datafeed never lags during high volume periods. In the rare case, CQG window pops up stating there is a slow datafeed connection and pops up again when the datafeed is back to normal.

I sent Mike (DTN Support) several screen shots at 2:20, 2:25 & 2:37 pm est showing the datafeed lag compared to CQG. As of this post no response has been received from DTN. I also sent him a screenshot last Wednesday after the oil inventories announcement when the datafeed lagged again.

Unfortunately, it might be time to look for another datafeed provider as DTN is not being responsive to its customers needs. As much as I don't want to go through the effort, my trading group needs a relaible datafeed provider. Amazing more traders don't voice their opinions.

jstar

I am not sure if my input will help, but I still have mytrack(that have cancelled) which has been having data lags at busy times for weeks on end, I trade with people indicating esignal in same situation lately. Not sure what has changed over last few months. What is funny IB feed has been fine. And years ago it was opposite way around. I am keeping a charting IB feed as back up.