Level II ARCA and island data

[MountainTrader]

Earlier this year, the ability to view the ARCA and Island books was added to esignal's level II. Unfortunately I have found that these never keep up to date in realtime so I am unable to use them for trading. Can anyone confirm this problem?

Please note: Of course I can use the island book viewer from island.com, and that's fine. The trouble I run into is that I need to view the ARCA book for QQQ and the book viewer from tradearca.com is absolutely terrible. It runs in a browser window and just sends out constant refresh requests. When market activity spikes, it often goes unstable (which, of course, is precisely when I need the information most).

So two things:

1) has anyone been able to use the island and arca features of esignal level II?

2) Do you know of some other source of ARCA data for QQQ that is reliable and robust?

Thanks in advance...

[AndyS]

Hi MountainTrader,

I'm not aware of this being a problem nor having seen similar complaints. I regret to say that I didn't get a chance to test this out today, but have it on my task list to test tomorrow morning.

I'll also forward this on to our QA group for their review and testing as well. Please feel free to add any specifics that you see. Also, if I may ask, how did you test / compare this issue to determine that it's not keeping up?

Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention and we'll test to see what we find here.

Regards,
Andy

[MountainTrader]

Hi AndyS,

Thanks for looking into this.

The island book viewer available at island.com is extremely reliable in my experience (I've been trading with it for several years), so you can test how esignal is handling the island book view on lev II by direct comparison. What I saw when I first tried to use the feature when it was added to esignal was that not only did it not keep up but erroneous entries were left behind in the book (so you might end up with the high bid being higher than the low offer, which is absolutely impossible on island). You'll want to test this with a very active stock like MSFT or INTC.

The ARCA book viewer available at tradearca.com, as I indicated in my original message, is not very robust. It can fail during periods of peak market activity, but it works most of the time and can therefore be used to compare how esignal keeps up. Also, the top of the ARCA book shows up on level II montage as coming from the PSE and you can therefore open a montage view and an arca view of the same security (QQQ for example) and see if they are in sync for the top of the book. On Tuesday I was seeing that the arca view was clearly several seconds behind.

I originally raised this issue with someone on LiveRep several months ago (whenever it was that the feature was first added to esignal), but apparently nothing ever came of it. I was not all that concerned about it because I discovered a work around. Since island provides a viewer that works fine, that was not an issue, but I needed a reliable way to view the arca book for QQQ. It so happened that the Ameritrade (formerly Datek) streamer level II had an arca view which kept up reliably. However, I noticed today this is no longer displaying any data at all. I'm going to try to find out why they changed that and whether it's a permanent change, but I would much rather be able to rely on esignal to operate properly as I then would not be relying on broker data feeds which tend to be rather capricious (that's one of the reasons I'm an esignal customer in the first place).

Overall I'm a VERY satisfied customer; I sincerely hope this issue can be cleared up.

If I get a chance to run some more tests on this during the tradng session today I'll get back to you here with any further information I can provide.

[MountainTrader]

Here's an update. I am currently watching the QQQ in two esignal level II windows, one set to montage, the other to ARCA.

ARCA is now running at least 5 seconds behind. You can tell this because the PSE quote in the montage is the ARCA quote. Also, the time and sales confirm that the market is where the level II montage quote indicates, NOT where the ARCA view indicates.

Hope this helps.

[MountainTrader]

OK, the market is quite active now. ARCA view for QQQ is running over a minute behind reality.

I'm now convinced you'll have no trouble seeing the problem, but I stand ready to provide more specific info if you request it.

I look forward to hearing back from you on this.

Thanks

[AndyS]

Hi Mountain Trader,

O.K., we've tested this issue this morning and see the delays. We sent the screen shots to our QA group, they have verified and in turn forwarded to issue to our engineers for correction.

I should hear back shortly on an initial determination of the problem and will post here. Again, thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.

Regards,
Andy