Today the Barclays feed has been unusable for 4 hours (so far) on over 1/2 my FX symbols tracked. This is totally unacceptable from any service claiming to be of 'premium' service. Be honest to your customers, is there a data integrity team that works 24/7 as your website claims? If there is a data integrity team working 24/7 then why aren't they noticing these problems and fixing them? If there is no data integrity team working 24/7 you guys are being intentionally dishonest and misleading your clients and prospective clients.

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If I sound annoyed and frustrated, it's because I am. I'm sick of this crappy Barclay's feed stopping for several hours at a time and being stuck while in positions. The data doesn't backfill when this happens. You guys claim to be providing premium services, but you are not. These non-premium services that are being offered are not being maintained by your staff.

I've supported you guys in open forums and have been a strong advocate of DTN since first becoming a customer some 1.5 years ago. Positive word of mouth spreads nicely, and so does negative word of mouth.

I'd like some honest answers DTN, right now you are the greatest risk to my trading business.

MK
Edited by midknight on Sep 4, 2007 at 04:23 AM

With regard to premium FX data, maybe you can consider contacting Oanda. They have an API they offer customers for data and order entry/mgmt functionality, so I know their data can be delivered to other applications. Perhaps DTN could act as an agent for their data.

This Barclays data has totally unimpressed me. Tullet is not an alternative because it doesn't offer many pairs.
Edited by midknight on Sep 4, 2007 at 05:17 AM

Can you give me some examples of data that is not filling in? The symbols I nortmally check seem to be fine now, granted this is some time after you reported the problem and I don't want to discount the report based on a limited sample.
Even if your data is now filling in I still need to know an example to track down the problem.

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Lonnie Shumate
Development Manager, IQ Systems
DTN Market ACCESS

This is a perfect example of how you guys DO NOT keep track of symbols that are in error. In previous thread I was reporting quoting of 0.000 on over 1/2 my Barclays FX symbols tracked. The problem never resolved itself at my end and persisted from 4pm local time until midnight when I went to bed.

You can clearly see the symbols in error by pulling up an intraday chart and look at the HUGE spike down to 0.0000. Surely you guys can figure that out on your own without needing me to tell you, can't you? I mean you are supposed to be data integrity specialists.

I'm very annoyed. I'm very frustrated. And I'm even more annoyed that DTN did not reply to my concerns over their data integrity and reliability policies and procedures. I want a response DTN, I expected more honesty from you. It's fine for you guys who keep charging me a monthly fee - you guys still get paid. When problems like this happen - I DON"T GET PAID! In my strong opinion they are happening too often with your premium FX data service and you need to offer a better solution or cut the FX offering altogether.

MK

I looked through a 5 minute chart going back 10 days on every spot Barclays symbol and see no charts with bars down to zero. It would really be helpful if you could provide a couple symbols when you report a problem so we don't have to look through every symbol trying to find what you are seeing. Since there is a 3rd party software package involved, it is often tough to find the same thing you are seeing. I would love to have staff looking through all 300,000 symbols every day. It isn't possible, especially for the price of our service. We have algorithms in place to look at the data, but those aren't perfect either. We are constantly trying to improve the algorithms based on feedback from people like you.

If you would like to provide more details (what symbols and timeframe) you see the bad data, we can research it further.

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Jay Froscheiser
DTN - Trading Markets

Please don't misunderstand me Jay, I'm not suggesting that DTN have guys just trawling through symbols all day long - what a mind numbing job that would be! I would have thought spikes on FX down to 0.0000 would be reported as this is a HUGE discrepancy, a complete destruction of the currency. Surely any spikes outside some sort of percentage should be picked up automatically and at the very least be marked for cleaning the historical data. Just my take on it.

Please respond to my comments about the 'premium' FX feed offered. If you could be an agent for the Oanda data, that would be a massive step towards offering premium FX data IMHO.

As you have said yourself, Barclays core business is not data. To my understanding, this is a major part of Oanda's business.

There is a couple things in play, and a few things being worked on here.

1) Our history servers won't record a price of zero. Thus, if the feed sends a zero trade, it isn't recorded because it is obviously bogus. However, if you use a 3rd party package that records and caches data locally (and doesn't have a zero price filter), you will need to delete the data and reload it from our servers.

2) We are working on implementing our RPC (Radical Price Checking) algorithms for IQFeed and Forex data. This should significantly reduce bad ticks showing on intraday and daily chart files. We hope to get that out in the next 2 months. In the mean time, we did some more cleanup manually on daily forex chart files. Thus, they should be better (although I still won't claim them to be perfect).

3) We are looking into other forex feeds. I don't know of Oanda will be one of them as we are still looking for the best options. Once we find something that will fit for our customer base, it will take development time to implement it.

I think you will find that step 2 is going to be the best option overall. We are working hard to get it implemented, but it is going to take some time.

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Jay Froscheiser
DTN - Trading Markets

Thanks for the post Jay.

For the record, no, I do not find #2 the best overall option. This barclays feed has stopped for several hours several times since recently subscribing to forex data. There is no historical data available for those holes.

The best option is #3, find a better FOREX feed. Of course, do the research, it would be worth contacting Oanda as one of your options though. They do deliver data and offer a ton of pairs. More then Tullet and Barclays do.

I wasn't very clear in my post. The reason I say option 2 is the best scenario is because it will happen sooner than us getting a new Forex feed. Short-term, option 2 is the primary focus. Option 3 is something we are working on that will take some more time, but is definately the best long term solution.

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Jay Froscheiser
DTN - Trading Markets