I have been checking out the quality of my internet connection with my service provider and learned some stuff that I thought might be useful to be aware of if one would like to have a reliable internet connection.
First, I use IQFeed and have an ADSL 2+ internet line with originally a 15.9 Mbit download speed.
What I learned was that the ideal line should have a Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) value of 10 or above. Next, the line should ideally have a noise level of 1 decibel per 100 meters, or 109.36 yards.
What I was told is that my connection is 1230 meters, or 1345,14 yards, from the central with a noise level of 13 decibel on download and 6 decibel on upload, which is within acceptable good values.
The SNR value was 8.3, which is below ideal values. I was therefore recommended to lower the internet speed to 14 Mbit or below. I chose 13,5 Mbit which gave a SNR value of 12.4. Well above value 10.
End of story.
Laurus
Edit: I would like to add that ping tests with IQFeed Diag Utility gives now averages of 158-160 ms. Also note that my service provider could have pushed my line up to 18 Mbit, but this would give low SNR values and an unstable line.
“If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything.” - Hsin Hsin Ming
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I see a lot of people ask if their internet connection is fast enough for trading. The question is misunderstood, people equate bandwidth to "fast". More bandwidth is great for download or watching a movie, youtube, game, whatever.... but bandwidth has no real benefit in trading.
What matters more in trading is latency (ping times). You can measure your ping time by going to Pingtest.net - The Global Broadband Quality Test and then click in Chicago, and run a test. That will give you a rough idea of the latency between you and your orders hitting the exchange, or how far behind the market you are in terms of delayed quotes.
For people inside the United States, the average is probably around 50ms ping to Chicago. The closer you are to a metropolitan area (like being close to Dallas, being close to Atlanta, being close to Los Angeles, etc) then the better off your ping will likely be. The next factor is how far that city is from Chicago. Obviously, the closer (physical distance) the shorter the ping.
There is little you can do as an end user. In terms of DSL, Cable Modem, Satellite, and FiOS, I would rank it in order of preference like so:
- FiOS
- DSL
- Cable
- Satellite
In fact, Satellite is not a viable option for a trader, the latency is just too huge. If you are able to get FiOS in your area, do it.
Just to add, people in Europe can expect latency of around 200ms to Chicago. To give some perspective to the ping test Mike performed, here's my ping result this morning to Chicago (the speed is quite "good", given the normal ping of around 200ms. I suppose it has to do with the fact that it's Saturday morning, 8 am here. ):
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See my Ping results to Chicago, from Lagos; My ISP has a direct cable link to the London Internet Exchange, but I connect to their service through their Wireless Access Point infrastructure. ... Very poor, very very poor ... so, what do I do ?
@lolu, from what I have seen in your Journal, your style of trading will not be affected by the Ping to any detrimental degree.
I scalp and have no problem with 250ms of Ping. I actually get 'better' fills than when I use NT under SIM (in other words NT's SIM's algorithms are harsher than Live where I have NT Sim set with exchange delay of 250ms)
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Thank you for the PingTest.net. I tried to find Omaha, Nebraska where I am connected to IQFeed (IQFeed data feed servers are located in both Omaha and Bellevue, Nebraska), but the closest I could get was Sioux City, Iowa.
The 159ms result is interesting, because this is within the 158-160ms average result I get with the IQFeed Diag Utility.
Laurus
“If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything.” - Hsin Hsin Ming
Here is another link which IQFeed recommended using for testing connection reliability: 2Wire.com: Speed Meter
Run the test several times to get an average. The average should be less than 20% difference between the high and low.
In general if connection drops below 500kbps there will be problems with IQFeed as 500kbps is the minimum connection that is required for IQfeed to connect and stay connected.
Laurus
“If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything.” - Hsin Hsin Ming
I respectfully disagree. It depends on what type of trading your doing. If your daytrading a couple of futures symbols, then sure, ping test far outweighs bandwidth. However if your daytrading largish baskets of equities, its a completely different story. IQFeed has up to 500 tickers you can connect to with their basic service, and if you multiply that out, it's alot of data. I know because I have an extraordinarily shitty ISP, one that gets clogged up around market open, and remains like that for a few hours (I am in Europe, so it corresponds with the time my neighbours get home from work).
IQFeed lays out its data in a format similar to a database. It will display prices in their right order, so if your bandwidth sucks, and the data gets backed up, you will still see prices changing, but the prices you see may from 5, 10, or in my case, up to 20 minutes ago.
I should state that when I trade the ES or NQ on its own, I never have this problem. But if I build an equity scanner in Amibroker, or any other app, I see this backup all the time. I'm on cable, and I regularly get 10Mbit during non peak hours.
Its for these reasons I am thinking of setting up a system at a co-location in the US. That way my US server can suck all the data, and the only bandwidth issues I will have here is the amount of data required to supply a remote server connection.
I check my lag by checking the prices between IQFeed and IB. TWS does not download data, and the price you see is the latest price + ping delay only. Its by this method I have recorded delays of 20 minutes.
Something to keep in mind if you track a reasonable number of tickers, and your bandwidth is less than guaranteed.
I am pullin the CME Group complete feed (around 250.000 symbols, sometimes near a billion updates per day) and that was topping around 2gb data. Right now for today (US time, now nearly 14:00 as I write it) we just approach 1000mb of data.
This is complete CME Group - all exchanges, all symbols. NxCore feed.
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How much bandwidth/throughput are you using (kb/sec)? Because I still think bandwidth is not important. Any mediocre broadband connection these days is at least 2Mb/sec. And if someone is needing more than that, then they aren't reading this post for advice anyway --- they already know their requirements.
Site Administrator Swing Trader Data Scientist & DevOps
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2GB of data over an 8 hour period = 256MB an hour = 4.2MB a minute = 70KB a second, the slowest of the absolute slow connection would be triple that at least.
My ISP is really bad at peak times, so I have had the pleasure of investigating this quite alot. The figures that I see is between 10-60MB per symbol per day, depending on the # ticks per minute. A great deal of this may shoot through in the first hour of trading - which is where I suffer the most congestion. If your looking at an instrument that has only one trade per second, it's about 10MB/per day. Something like the ES or AAPL could have a much larger multiple of ticks per minute. Extrapolating some guesstimates here:
20 MB per symbol per day (average);
30% (would that be right?) of trades in the first 2 hours;
150 symbols;
20*0.3* 150 = 900MB of download in 2 hours.
I might attach a bandwidth manager to confirm. My cable has no problems with this kind of qty, but cannot do it in a timely fashion during busy times. Sometimes I see on my IQFeed stats 100KB/sec, other times 1kb/sec. It's the inconsistency that causes the backlog.
First, this is way too much data- I process with 2-3 mbit sometimes ab out 50.000 ticks per second. Second, this really looks like the ISP just oversells? Try a bandiwdth test during peak hours.
