Friday, July 27, 2007

Ameritrade vs. eTrade feed




  • This is really frustrating!
  • I have an Ameritrade account from years ago... which I do not have a penny in it for the past few years. I have transferred all the money into my eTrade account
  • Since the account is still valid, when I was introduced to QuoteTracker (QT), I set it up in QT that it will use my Ameritrade account to get the feed
  • Sadly, this is the second time this month that I noticed a discrepancies in charts, between QT/Ameritrade and eTrade
  • I don't ususally log into my eTrade account these days since I'm still Paper Trading
  • But today, I was logged-in to eTrade to update my account balance, and while I was there, I wanted to observe how the Level II quotes appear on CROX. (I dont' usually have time for Level II when I'm trading from work.)
  • When I pulled up the chart in eTrade, I immediately noticed a different between my QT chart and eTrade chart
  • From the charts above... the white background is QT/Ameritrade, while the black background is eTrade
  • You can easily see that the 3rd circle from the left shows a gap-down in QT, but such gap does not exist in eTrade
  • The 1st and 2nd circles from the left shows that the Upper and Lower shadows are clearly different between the two charts!
  • The same applies to the remaining 3 circles on the right... the shadows are clearly different between the two charts!
  • My work has exposed me to identify theft prevention, etc., and one of the reason why I chose to use the Ameritrade feed is the fact that it has no money in that account
  • If I have to provide my User Name and Password to QT, and then relying QT to log in to my eTrade account... the 'anal' side of me is worried that the QT might mis-handle my log-in information. Basically, how am I supposed to know if QT is not secretly sending my log-in info to somewhere/one else?
  • But since it appears that a lot of full-time traders are also using QT, which I have to believe that their account balance gotta have a few more zeros than mine, I guess I am just worrying too much... I hope
  • Besides, eventually, I know I have to move-on to something else. eTrade or not. Because Ameritrade's feed is simply INCORRECT! Maybe it's time for me to switch to eTrade feed, at least for now
To my 3 loyal readers, if you have a suggestion, I would like to hear from you.

Have a good weekend!

4 comments:

  1. question: how do you know its the ameritrade data that is wrong?

    ReplyDelete
  2. @ Annonymous: The first time it happened to me, I did a comparison between Ameritrade vs eTrade vs Marketwatch.com, and the charts between eTrade and Marketwatch are in sync. Therefore, I made the assumption that it is Ameritrade that has the discrepancy.

    ReplyDelete
  3. So, I guess Ameritrade has been having these feed problems for years See Http://stockmarketloss.wordpress.com

    ReplyDelete
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