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@josh I see your point. I do have access to some other feeds not TT and would have to compare more closely although not sure when I will have time to watch that closely since my trades are executed via AT. I have used feeds where you could see large lag even without another feed side by side. I don't see any lag on rithmic but am viewing it in this manner. I think for you to get accurate picture though you might have to compare on live executing feed and not just paper trade feed. Although there may be no difference I suspect there could be.
"The day I became a winning trader was the day it became boring. Daily losses no longer bother me and daily wins no longer excited me. Took years of pain and busting a few accounts before finally got my mind right. I survived the darkness within and now just chillax and let my black box do the work."
They don't always but there are times demo feeds are hosted on different servers so you can get lag. I am not sure what rithmic does.
"The day I became a winning trader was the day it became boring. Daily losses no longer bother me and daily wins no longer excited me. Took years of pain and busting a few accounts before finally got my mind right. I survived the darkness within and now just chillax and let my black box do the work."
Your test result is same as mine, and SC went through all my record yesterday, and it shows Rithmic feed lags, not my setup or SC problems. BUT, I got the Demo though Mirus, which uses Rithmic and Server - Paper Trading in SC. Today I setup the Demo through Optimus, using Rithmic and Server - Production, I tested this morning, works excellent, no lags, CL dropped 75 ticks in one minutes, I did not see any lags.
Anyway, my test shows that if you get Demo though Mirus, you will get Rithmic feed lag; if get from Optimus, Rithmic works great.
@Futures Operator I don't think is out of the ordinary for data provider paper feeds to be of less quality than live executing feeds.
"The day I became a winning trader was the day it became boring. Daily losses no longer bother me and daily wins no longer excited me. Took years of pain and busting a few accounts before finally got my mind right. I survived the darkness within and now just chillax and let my black box do the work."
Yes, but really what's the point in testing/demoing/comparing the different feeds then, if they don't give accurate representations of their live performance?
I've e-mailed @rithmic and linked them to this topic, and I actually see they have signed in and are viewing this thread, hopefully they can clear up any confusion here. I would love more clarity on the bandwidth/latency/jitter requirements, as well as best broker/feed source to avoid the lag issues that have been described here.
Over the years Rithmic had several demo systems. Currently they have 2, uat and paper trading.
Uat is connected to the test systems of the exchanges. Rithmic customers and prospects typically connect to uat to test basic functionality of programs they write that incorporate R | API. They test placing orders, getting market data, cancelling orders, etc. The test systems of the exchanges are run like actual exchanges so the market data in the exchanges’ test systems is the market data that the exchanges’ systems generate in response to new orders, modifications of orders and cancellations of orders. That market data is not market data form the live market. As there may not be many users connected to the exchanges’ test systems at any one time, and different users may be testing using different prices, the exchanges’ test system are not suitable for evaluating trading strategies or volume testing.
So Rithmic built it's own exchange simulator and hooked it up to real live market data. Rithmic customers and prospects may be granted access to this system, subject to exchange market data distribution rules, and test Rithmic’s front end screens, R | Trader and R | Trader Pro, third party screens like MultiCharts or SierraChart or their own proprietary trading software built with R | API. The paper trading system is a pretty good system for testing certain types of trading strategies and for testing basic functionality of a trading program and for testing trading programs with respect to market data throughput. The market data is the market data from the live market, but it is Rithmic that generates the fills. In our opinion its very accurate but it is not a substitute for the real thing. Many users find it to be a very useful tool.
Rithmic production systems run on machines different from the machines used by Rithmic’s uat and paper trading environments so that prod is not affected by users testing. The paper trading environment is not in Aurora (so the CME data it gets which originates in Aurora takes a few milliseconds to get to it (compared to Rithmic’s prod systems running in Aurora). The cost profile for Aurora and the cost profile of the paper trading environment are quite different, substantially lower for paper trading. Consequently, “you get what you pay for” translates into a paper trading system that is a good image of the live market but a bit slower.
If you would like to demo the live feed, please contact us at Optimus.
With respect to detecting and correcting slowness, Rithmic monitors the latency of their market data constantly. If Rithmic detects high latency, or if a user reports high latency, Rithmic investigates it and takes corrective action based upon their findings. As I am sure you can imagine, there can be many causes for latency, especially in an environment that has sustained peaks of market data rates in excess of 100,000 messages per second every day and which supports several thousand users concurrently. Sometimes bottlenecks affecting the smooth flow of market data occur because of changes in users’ behavior as happened a week or so ago when some users began requesting market data for all options (they stopped until they can request their data differently). Other times new or additional hardware is required as is the case presently (I understand that new hardware arrived today and will be deployed this weekend).
Trading futures and options involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. You may lose more than your initial investment. All posts are opinions and do not claim to be facts. Please conduct your own due diligence. Use only Risk capital when trading Futures.
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@mattz, thanks for posting Rithmic's response to my second email. For anyone else interested, below is their first response, to when I asked them to comment on the lag issue users have mentioned here. After which I asked them about the point of the demo feed if it's not accurate, and why these lag issues hadn't been corrected up till now, then they explained the above which matt posted.
Also, I'd note that Rithmic said either Optimus or Mirus could demo a live production feed.
"The posts seem to state that the market data lags are seen in our demo system. Our demo system (our paper trading system) runs completely separately from our prod system and on hardware that is not as powerful. It should not be used as a measure for speed, latency, etc.
In prod on Friday at the close and today, Monday around 10:13am ny time, we and some customers noticed some slowness when the market data rates spiked for a few seconds. we are taking action to make sure that when such spikes reoccur, and they will, that there will be virtually no slowness."
I don't think simply observing a lag on one feed on one day, and not observing a lag on another feed on another morning is a test that is scientific at all or gives any useful information. Even the laggy feed may not always lag, or if/when it does, you may not notice it or miss it.
As I qouted in my post from Rithmic above, they admitted even their production feed (what you got from Optimus as a demo) experienced some lags recently on over a few days, for short periods of time. They have already taken steps to address this issue.
Also, I asked Rithmic to clarify regarding the difference in their feed through different brokers, here is their response:
"The uat and paper trading environments provided by brokers who offer Rithmic is the same. For Prod, Optimus uses a system that we make available to our clients and is shared amongst them. Mirus has its own deployment of our software (Zen-Fire) on its own machines, in its own data center using its own exchange connections."
What I get from this is that, if you have UAT or Demo from Rithmic through any broker, it will be the same, and if you have Prod from Rithmic through any broker, it will be the same. However, ZF through Mirus is not the original pure Rithmic feed, as it goes through their own infastructure.