RE: [system-traders] quotes

["Law, Craig" <Craig.Law AT team.telstra.com>]

Thanks João

That's great information

Cheers

Craig

-----Original Message-----
From: João Antunes Costa [mailto:Joao.Antunes.Costa
AT
cgd.pt] 
Sent: Wednesday, 6 July 2005 7:50 PM
To: system-traders
AT
geniustrader.org
Subject: RE: [system-traders] quotes

forex.com, or Gain Capital, which is the name of the company behind it, provides an API which allows you to place orders programatically, and also a data feed, however, if you just want to run backtests, you can get their historical data from here:

http://ratedata.gaincapital.com/

This is tick data, which is supported by GT. However, running a backtest using tick data is really, really slow. I have a script at home to convert tick data into other timeframes supported by GT. Let me know if you're interested, I can post it here, or even add it to SVN. You still need to import the tick data into a database however.


You can get more info about their datafeed and API at the following locations:

http://www.forex.com/forex-api.html
http://api.efxnow.com/forum/


To have access to their API and datafeed, you need to open a "standard account", minimum $2,500USD, and you have to trade in lots, each lot being 100,000 of whatever currency you're trading. That's really bad for money management, unless you have a larger account, 10,000 USD or more.

I know oanda.com also has a trading API, which is free if you trade a lot, but you have to pay extra for the data feed. They have the advantage of not having a minimum lot size.


Some advantages of the forex market in my opinion:
 - Great liquidity
 - Open 24 hours a day
 - No need to worry about stock splits/dividends
 - Much harder to manipulate than the stock market. Things like Enron, Worldcom and Parmalat can't happen here (I think, you never know what the sharks are up to)


Disadvantages
 - Some brokers offer extremely high leverages, up to 200:1. You need to be carefull not to leverage that much, cause it can wipe your account in a blink of an eye. (It can also triple your money just as fast, if you're lucky, but that's no longer trading, that's betting, and the odds are against you)






-----Original Message-----
From: Law, Craig [mailto:Craig.Law
AT
team.telstra.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2005 4:27 AM
To: system-traders
AT
geniustrader.org
Subject: RE: [system-traders] quotes


Hi João

Just a quick question. I've had a look around the forex.com site regarding the data feed you talk about below but couldn't find much about it. Do you have a method to feed it into GT to run backtesting and scans? I'm looking at getting into forex trading but need to do a bit more research.

Thanks

Craig


-----Original Message-----
From: João Antunes Costa [mailto:Joao.Antunes.Costa
AT
cgd.pt]
Sent: Tuesday, 5 July 2005 8:05 PM
To: system-traders
Subject: RE: [system-traders] quotes

I personally no longer follow stocks all that much, but when I did, I used beancounter to get the data from Yahoo.

The main problem with it is stock splits and dividend adjustments. Altough some improvements have recently been made, Yahoo data is often not reliable regarding stock splits, so there's really not much beancounter can do about that.

Right now, I trade mostly in the forex market, and my broker (forex.com) provides me a data feed to work with, so that really takes care of the "data problem".

Anyway, I strongly recommend looking at paid data feeds. Very often we try to get "free" stuff, but then end up wasting a lot of our time trying to use the "free" stuff. If I was to accurately calculate how much time I spent dealing with "stock splits" and other data problems, when I used to work with Yahoo data, I quickly realize it would have been less expensive to simply buy the data.



-----Original Message-----
From: Flatman [mailto:flatman
AT
swing.be]
Sent: Monday, July 04, 2005 10:21 PM
To: system-traders
Subject: [system-traders] quotes



I thought about using beancounter for downloading stock data for use with Geniustrader...
Is this the way most of Geniustraders get free quotes ?
Or is there something other/better ?

Thanks
Erik