Ok I'm setting up NT7, and I have to purchase a lease so I can use the chart trader. I've always just used ZenFire. But I got my broker telling me CGQ is better. Is it? Why? Or is it all the same?
When I signed up with Amp initially they raved about how great Zenfire was. When they changed over to CQG they (Amp) again raved about how great CQG was. I have not noticed much difference except that CQG seems more reliable. Hope this helps.
I'm with AMP also. They recommend CQG because Zenfire started to charge a $25.00 inactivity fee unless a minimum number of live trades take place. No good for SIM trading as Zenfire still views it as inactivity.
Here's the Zenfire statement:
Zen Fire User Only: $25 Inactivity Fee Structure | beginning February 1, 2012
In order to remain in compliance with exchange market data vendor regulations and discourage abuse of market data access, Zen Fire will impose restrictions and fees on user ids beginning February 1, 2012.
Zen Fire team will work with the FCMs to help identify offending user ids and disable or create exemptions for the new fee structure being implemented.
Definitions
Inactive User: any user id, or multiple thereof, that accesses the trading engine in any calendar month and trades less than 40 contracts/ 20 round turns per month.
Idle User: any user id that is active but does not access the trading infrastructure.
Active User: any user id that trades more than 40 contracts in a calendar month.
Insufficient Funds User: any user id with authority to trade an account with a liquidating value of less than $400.
Inactivity Fee Structure: $25 per Inactive User Id.
Notes: Zen Fire will attempt to automatically disable all Insufficient Funds User ids 30 days after their account falls below the minimum in order to avoid any unnecessary fees. FCMs may, at their discretion, re-enable the ids manually if there is reasonable assurance that funds are being sent. If the id accesses the trading infrastructure, they may still be billed as an Inactive User.
What is going to happen?
1) Zenfire User ID will be disabled if: hasn't traded in 3 months or has less than $400 in their account.
2) $25 Inactivity fee will be charged if: less than 40 contracts/ 20 round turns per month have been executed/traded.
Assuming both feeds are uncompressed and raw, I'd think the only other thing to worry about would be latency from your location to where the data source servers are, as well as reliability/up time. And both are of course difficult to gauge, with the latency for the average NA user on a decent internet feed probably negligible.
I'm on CQG and use it almost 7/24 - it is incredibly rare there are problems, inavailability or disconnects.
One thing that comes to mind with CQG is that they have a web trader, where, you could log in via a IE browser (Chrome doesn't work), to cancel or make any basic changes to standing orders, should NT or your main internet feed go down. Not sure if Zenfire has this, but for a FT trader, this is a major edge to me.
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I started with CQG in Jan. 2012 and liked it. Now with Rithmic since May 2012 and also like it.
CQG seemed faster to me but with much more disconnects (disconnects that sometimes take several minutes to end). Rithmic seems a bit slower than CQG (but still ok). However, almost never has disconnects (only had one in the past month and it was so short it was almost unnoticeable if I didn't see it visually).
Overall I prefer Rithmic to CQG due to the importance of staying connected.
It's my understanding that Zen Fire is a "white label" of sorts of Rithmic - but I'm not sure if it's comparable beyond that.
Hope this helps.
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My experience with CQG has been that they dont seem to go down as much as Zenfire. I dont have any proof (statistics) except to say that Zenfire seemed to go down literally every other day. CQG seems more stable but perhaps I haven't given CQG enough time.
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I am using CQG and I can confirm that it is a very reliable and fast, even at busy opening session hours.
Also, they are good with further distances connection, above 200 msecs ping, like mine.
The only real difference I've noticed is that when you have a disconnect from your DSL
the CQG will take a lot longer to reconnect.
I've asked NT support about this and apparently CQG has a price server and a trade server.
The price server seems to reconnect faster than that trade server most of the time.
This means that I can see the price moving but if I have a 'live' order working when the disconnect occurs
I may not be able to exit or modify the trade until the trade server reconnects. Sometimes the only way to
get it to reconnect is to totally disconnect and reconnect.
I have not experienced the same issue with Zenfire or Rithmic.
I don't know if they use two servers or not, but the issue has never occurred for me.
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I used Mike's suggestion to look at the amount of data send by the data feed and that is displayed in the MultiCharts QuoteManager.
I've only collected data during the European morning till mid-afternoon (the US opens in about 10 minutes), but the differences are already quite remarkable; the number of received ticks with CQG is around 3 times as much as with ZenFire! In other words, with the ZenFire data feed I'm only seeing one third of the market (is that a correct interpretation?).
I'm surprised by this, I didn't expect such a big difference. Does someone know what might cause this? I've double-checked my settings, all symbols are set to 'Fields to collect: bid, ask, trade; tick'.
(PS: I'm not saying the CQG is better because of the higher amount of ticks. It might be that CQG lags more or has more erroneous ticks than ZenFire, so overall CQG might not be better).
I'm inclined to agree with your interpretation, however today the difference is soo big, that I'm beginning to think something is wrong with the ZenFire API in MultiCharts 8.0. (I've already emailed MC support about this). Or I'm doing something very wrong.
For example, CQC send today for FESX @ EUREX almost one million (no, I'm not kidding) more ticks than ZenFire for the same symbol, periodicity and time period. And we still have 3.5 hours till Eurex closes, so the difference might increase further.
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Hmm, so this means that the tick charts from the two feeds should look completely different! Could you perhaps post some, it might be a good way to judge how big the impact is in real life...
Vvhg
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Yes that's right - NT/ZF only does 5 levels of the DOM. If MC do more, say 10 levels, then this will account for most of the difference. I have no experience with MC so do not know how many DOM levels you can display with CQG vs ZF.
Not sure who sent you this but I trade with ZF via Mirus and you only have to do FIVE RT's a month to avoid all fees - and in my view this is not unreasonable.
- it is still in Beta
- they seem to have stopped development on it.
- you have to get your broker to advise ZF that you are allowed to login twice with the same password ie once on NT and once via the Web Trader.
- the Web Trader has an option for access via the iPhone. There is no app - just save the web address to the iPhone. It is cluncky to login on the iPhone, but once in the formatting is not bad for the phone.
- on Web Trader (on a PC) you can have multiple DOMs going, you can have a quote board and monitor live and completed orders plus your account balance. Putting instruments on the quote board is a pain - you have to know the full exchange code/path for each and change at each contract rollover.
I thought that both feeds supply 10 levels (not 100% sure, though), but NT only shows five.
If so, this can't be the reason for the difference. Maybe the difference has to do with how exactly the data is structured. E.g. when price ticks 1 up, taking the offer 1 up with it and thus revealing the number at offer+10 levels, simultaneously someone submits an order 5@offer+3, how many data ticks would that be in the two feeds?
The difference in the QuoteManager with ZenFire versus CQG is only for best bid, best ask and last trade. So for that comparison it doesn't matter how many levels the data feed provides, since only the first levels are saved for each data feed. (Of course, for actual trading it might matter )
They don't look completely different (see below), but they're perhaps different enough to give different results (depending on the strategy type used).
For example, the opening bar from CQG is very different from ZenFire. Besides that, there are some smaller differences (see for example the bar high's and close).
I'm not sure what I should make of this. CQG provides more updates, but if I look at the wide range opening bar from CQG I'm more inclined to think ZenFire has a better feed. But that's still quite subjective and circumstantial.
EDIT:
You've raised a good point vvhg, in real-time trading the charts may be quite different. For example, the following example taken from real-time might give two traders, both looking at the same instrument on the same platform with the same chart settings, a slightly different bias about the price:
Also note that the volume for both charts is different, with the ZenFire chart displaying the same volume as IB TWS, while the CQG has a lower volume. For the people not familiar with this instrument, the exchange opened about 1 hour 45 minutes ago and the total session lasts 14 hours. I find it troubling that there's already a difference in the volume when we're just in the beginning of the session.
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I mean what's the purpose of it/what does it tell you? I seem to see it mentioned around discussions of NT DOM limitation to 5 levels, unless I picked that up incorrectly.
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After using both feeds I would say they are pretty similar. I have used CQG much more and have never had any issues with data or execution. I believe there are a couple of videos of the two feeds side-by-side in real time. As far as speed they seem very close but many factors come into play, mainly the quality of your connection to their servers. An other consideration when dealing with feeds would be reliability. In my opinion CQG is the one to go with, it has never let me down.
Just a small note: Rithmic (and presumably Zenfire) data IS sent compressed over the Internet (this is transparent to the platform).
I don't know about CQG: in case theirs is not, you couldn't compare the amount of data you see over Internet connection. Anyway, for what I can understand, nobody has done this, you have compared the number of ticks, right?
Hope this can help anyway
I'm looking at moving from Mirus to AMP in order to use CQG (no inactivity fee, zenfire does seem to get stuck around news, CQG has more exchanges on offer I think).
However, can someone confirm that CQG historic data is the same / similar to zenfire. Will charting work in Ninja basically the same way that it did under ZenFire?
Also, someone mentioned a web portal to access CQG. I don't suppose there is a way to manage this scenario?:
- Place an order in Ninja
- Go to the web portal and somehow 'adjust' the order so that stops and targets AND OCO's rest on the server
- I could then turn Ninja off and my orders AND THE OCOs would remain on the server
I'm really surprised that there is not a cleaner option for people who want to use these data fees, and Ninja, but want OCOs to reside on the server.. Especially for swing traders right ?
you can call the trade desk with your instructions
you need to have a decent connection to where you trade from(cable v3) and a good computer then:
CQG is a superior connection for people in Australia, solid, fast and very detailed(tonnes of ticks), includes aussie SPI, from AMP and the commission is cheap; perhaps a few cents off the cheapest but who cares if it works; and margins are low.
With OCO on the server - you need to check yourself, I do not use it.
What do you trade?
Good luck
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Velocity Futures will be getting with their friends at CQG to present a Webinar on the CQG trading platform and services on Wednesday, August 3rd at 4:30PM Eastern Time US.
CQG Trader is a high-performance market data tool for traders that don't …
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After send an OCO order with profit and stoploss, turn off my computer, the price cross my profit order and didn't close the position, so CQG doesn't send the OCO orders to the server. If you have an order, make sure to close it before stop Ninjatrader. Such a pitty, but CQG doesn't allow with AMP. Maybe you need to contract this service...
I do not believe this is correct. Did you have some kind of order rejection that may have caused this to happen or was this before CQG implemented serve side OCO?
It will work the same way, NinjaTrader historical data servers are used for both Zen-Fire and CQG.
There is no need to adjust orders from a web portal. By default, NinjaTrader submits stop loss/target orders as OCO. Both orders are at the exchange but the OCO logic is run at the server level.
@NinjaTrader, Not saying I would do this but if I had an ATM with OCOs active I can shut down NT and everything would work like normal? I could then just start NT and see my position flat if it was filled, target or stop?
