In this case, more is definitely not better. The previous news segments we received via satellite were much more concise and helpful. For instance, the Business, Finance and Economy section contained pertinent, market-moving updates, whereas the current Breaking News Headlines and Big Stories seemingly capture every news release available, regardless of its relative importance. The previous section titled Earnings & Company News was useful in expanding coverage on individual stocks and the section that gives an overview of the markets was precisely that- a quick, concise way of checking what was moving the market. Also, the events calender/schedule of economic reports was superior to the newer listings. The current Analyst commentary section is the most commendable of the service, but, overall the tedium of parsing through reams of relatively unimportant data to find that one piece of news you must read is not a trade-off I would like to become accustomed to. Any change back to the old news releases(or a compromise between the two) would be greatly appreciated.

First of all, thank you for your comments. Feedback from customers is the best way for us to continue improving what we provide to our users.

With the change in news feeds, our goal is to provide our customers with broad covereage so they receive tradeable information on the companies they watch. With RealTimeTraders (RTT), we have the Breaking News Headlines to news to you faster. RTT still provides overall market coverage through the Market Overview segments, and the Big Stories segment provides full text stories on companies and events that need more elaboration or have a more significant impact on the market.

In our evaluation of RTT, we found them to provide the best overall coverage while still maintaining most of the content previously covered by our newsroom. While the content may be in a different format or a different location, most of it is still available. We are working on tweaking the Calendars and Reports section to fill in gaps that may be left, so keep an eye there to see if you can find what you are missing.

In the mean time, all comments regarding news will be read by RTT so they can work to meet the needs of our users. Based on your feedback and comments from others, hopefully we will be able to get more of what you need in our RTT feed.

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Jay Froscheiser
DTN Market Access, LLC.

Regarding Spectrum Changes: I can not believe how badly you screwed up a simple system.. Pages and pages of self serving news items while deleting the earnings and revenue information, I spoke to Tylor there this morning and he said that the earning information was not available on any of your products. You have also deleted the spot metal prices, bad move.. The free news was a cost option before and few wanted it and now it is mandatory spam. Your extra pages has slowed down my system noticeably. Maybe it is time to look for a new supplier of information.
Here is what I want:
1. Real time snapshot of quotes - Total number characters transmitted are the same just not delayed. It only cost 1 dollar per exchange..
2. 40 formulas not 20. You have the room. When formulas was first started one of the screens was set up for 40. You news usage shows you have the memory and cpu to do it.
3. Improve the Quick Quote Screen to inclued the last 8 quarters of revenues, eps and P/L
In summary. you could have a very good system but as it is now you may be headed back to bankruptcy again as many leave DTN for competing suppliers.. Many are free.

Gene,

Thank you too for your comments. I am hoping you can elaborate more on your definition of "self serving news". One of the reasons we switched to RTT was because the content we were putting out more fit my definition of self serving. We previously only provided content on companies our editors thought were news worthy. Unfortunately, we have many customers trading stocks outside of the nasdaq 100 or SP500. We now carry news on nearly every publicly traded company. For people that want to only see news that is moving a stock, the big stories or market summary provides similar content to what the newsroom at DTN used to put out. I have talked to RTT and they are working on providing an even more concise segment that will pare down these stories even further. Essentially only providing the stories you would likely see on CNBC.

As for earnings information. We still have earnings information on all publicly traded companies. It is now in a wire format as opposed to a table, which will now allow you to keyword search and symbol search to receive alerts on companies you track.

I will look into the spot metals. The metals page is still available under the calendars and reports segment. If the spots aren't listed, I will talk to the editor to see if we can get that back.

Regarding your requests:
>>1. Real time snapshot of quotes - Total number characters transmitted are the same just not delayed. It only cost 1 dollar per exchange..

This isn't likely to be done via satellite since it will require more bandwidth or CPU utilization on the box to time the snap shots. Unfortunately all of the exchanges don't provide a 1 dollar fee. You can get RT streaming data on all equity exchanges without a snapshot for $1. If I recall correctly, CBOT has a snapshot option, but it is $10 per month, not 1. Each exchange requires a different snapshot period, and different fees.

>>2. 40 formulas not 20.
I will evaluate this. Which service do you currently have from us?

>>3. Improve the Quick Quote Screen to inclued the last 8 quarters of revenues, eps and P/L
We don't currently archive earnings information to provide historical fundamental data. It is something we have often considered, but it hasn't made it far enough up the list to be developed.

We aren't heading back to bankruptcy. We are financially stronger than ever, most likely due to the increasing number of people signing up for both our satellite and Internet services. There is nobody in the market who can provide the reliability and breadth of data we provide at a lower cost.

Our hope with the news change is to improve services, not take something away from our customers. With continued feedback from users, we will be able to work on other improvements that will continue to improve customer satisfaction and the value we provide.

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Jay Froscheiser
DTN Market Access, LLC.

Thanks for the Reply Jay, First I have an older Spectrum system and use it for stock trading. It has served my needs so far but could be so much better. It is a stand alone system with out internet bugs and reliable. If only you would upgrade it to a state of the art box.
Self serving news.. Many of the analysts reports are nothing more that sales tools for them.
Same for many of the company announcements. Your prior earning page had symbols that could be easily read and reviewed if of interest.. Your current displays are difficult to read.
please explain how I can now get the quarterly reports with as much ease as I used to.
1. Near real time snap shot.. DTN would receive the streaming quotes, summarize them and would then transmit the snap shot every few minutes. There would not be any need of bandwidth increase. In today's market, a 20 minute delay is not a competitive product.
2. 40 Formulas would be great.. Also perhaps increase the number of stocks to watch in the interday charts list..
3. Quick Quote Screen. You would only need to add 8x3 fields to the historical base and code a couple of sweeper programs. How hard could that be..
4. Perhaps data over AM/FM is the next step, It recently became legal and would be portable.

Gene,

most of your suggestions are good ones, and I will explore each of them. Implementing real time snapshots wouldn't take more bandwidth as you mention, but it would require every one of our customers to fill out exchange agreements and pay exchange fees. The logistics of this may cause issues, because we can't send both delayed and RT equities. Thus, anyone who didn't pay or fill the agreements out, would completely lose their data. I do like the idea however, and will ponder how we may be able to make it happen.

Based on some of the features you are looking for, I am curious if you would be willing to use a PC to process the data we send to you via satellite? We are finishing up our DTN.IQ for Satellite software, which will allow you to pass data into Excel automatically (unlimited formula capability using Excel), Unlimited filtering and bookmarking of news (allow you to create your own "Custom" news segments based on keywords and/or symbols you are interested in), unlimited watch lists with as many symbols as you want, and unlimited charting. Of course you would also be able to have all of these windows open at the same time with the ability to archive to your PC.

The features you desire are all doable, but we have to weigh the development effort of creating these features on the proprietary box versus putting that resource into our software interface for satellite or the Internet clients.

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Jay Froscheiser
DTN Market Access, LLC.

Thank you for your quick response.
The main reason I favor your proprietary box is that it is trouble free and by my having a power conditioner on it, it has not needed replacement for many years.. It is just that it is not now state of the art.. Perhaps a master agreement with the exchanges where by if a person has a contract with you for spectrum then the exchange agreements are included.
The cost difference should be minimal. Users pay you, you pay the exchanges. If users did not pay you, you would cut them off anyway. DTN would only offer the "near real time snap shot".
As for the DTN.IQ for Satellite.. Yes, I agree that the Unlimited capabilities are enticing, however I am not a day trader and would prefer an information tool that is blissfully simple and reliable as is the spectrum system is now. Everything works together and seamlessly.
Thanks again,
Gene

Jay,
Thank you for putting the spot metal prices back..
Keep working on the sales and earning pages..
As far as the near real time snap shot, perhaps a survey of users would be useful.. Place a questionair on the system and have users call the 800 number.
Gene

To be honest, I don't know if a survey would be required. The people who miss the content that is no longer available are calling already, and we recording all comments and compiling what pages are the most important for our customers. Most of the reports are still available. Some of the more labor intensive ones such as the earnings pages aren't currently, but I will work with RTT to see if they would be willing to populate the table for us.

We will do what we can to continue providing what the majority of our customer need. While I understand some people will leave because they need "that 1 page", we are focusing on the pages that are being requested most often. Right now that includes the earnings and economic results tables. These pages have been the most requested so far, but to put it into perspective, the number of requests has been under 10 for each.

I don't like to lose any customers, and we will continue to work to try to provide everything you need. I can't guarantee that we can find sources for all of the reports being requested, but we will do our best.

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Jay Froscheiser
DTN Market Access, LLC.

Jay,

You seem to be willing to listen to your customers, judging from the traffic in these forums, so thanks for that! Just 2 comments please (no need to reply) 1) It would have been nice to have known in advance that the company eps and sales data pages were suddenly going to disappear. That they suddenly were not updating was a real puzzle to the non-tech people here and a source of stress for them. But so be it... 2) We would be willing to pay extra to have these pages back just like they were, or better, that is with more coverage and accuracy! Via the internet rather than satellite as now would be cool, too! Via email as an hourly text update would be really cool!! How much per month? I gotta think about that one. Since it is a manual or editorial value-added service, an extra fee would be acceptable to many others as well, I should think. If you get 100 people to pay $50/month extra, that might pay for newsroom staff time, no?

figuring out a way to get it back as a premium service may be an option, but so far there hasn't been enough interest to really justify it. Our/your best bet is going to be for us to try to get RTT to create this again for us. They already have editors reporting earnings, so maybe we can get them to populate our database for us (this is what our editors used to do). Then we created the text files out of the database. As an aside, these tables have been available on our Internet products (both DTN.IQ and FinWin) for the past few years. If we can work out RTT populating the database, adding functionality to send a timed or EOD email with the earnings table would be easily done.

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Jay Froscheiser
DTN Market Access, LLC.