Hi,

I need some clarification on IQFeed Level 1 update message on US stocks.

1. Is "Bid Time" always equal to "Ask Time"? I've checked on many symbols and I couldn't find a single case where "Bid Time" is not equal to "Ask Time".

2. For "Message Contents" field, is it always the case that it will always show "ba" if it is a quote update? Again, I could not find a case where it will show only "a" or "b".

3. For "Message Contents" field, can it have "C" (or "O" or "E") and "ba" (or "a" or "b") at the same time? That is, can the message contain both a trade update and a quote update? Again, I couldn't find a case where it has both a trade and a quote update.

4. For "Most Recent Price", "Last Price", "Bid Price" and "Ask Price" fields, do they always have at least two decimal places? For example, if the price is, say, exactly 5 dollars, then will it show 5.00 but not 5 or 5.0?

5. Since IQFeed has servers from both Omaha and Bellevue, how can I force the IQConnect.exe to choose a IQFeed server from Bellevue if my server is located near Bellevue? My server is at Denver which is actually near Bellevue based on ping time.

1. They are usually sent as a pair by the exchange, so I can't say always, but for US equities it is largely true. Other exchanges can do this differently than US equities.

2. No, per the same conditions given above

3. No, a refresh message could include any number of conditions.

4. We use the formatting provided to us by the exchange here, so for US equities this is almost always to two decimal places, but I am sure there are exceptions to this as is appropriate on a per symbol basis.

5. You could probably do some DNS routing and such to make this happen, but this would be HIGHLY discouraged as it would cause you to lose all the redundancy options built into the system.

Hope this helps, but let me know if I left out anything.

Tim

Hi Tim,

I am sorry that I am a little confused on your answer on question 3. Do you mean that a Q message can have a quote update and a trade update? What is a refresh message? Is it a resend?

Yes, refreshes can have multiples, but those are also P messages, not Q messages, so maybe that is not relevant to what you need. For US equities I have confirmed we should not have both. So you should be able to handle these as either a quote or a trade message, and not both.

Tim