tickzoom

Sorry for your confusion. That pricing page was just a draft for discussion. It was never "alpha" pricing. As you observed that defies common sense. Alpha period will end in a matter of days and seems successful. There's not even a check out page or paypal setup yet for this. So it's all for discussion right now. I just updated that page to make that more clear. Can we please cease discussion of tickzoom here? FYI, there has been discussion of using TZ Engine to feed data to Matlab and otherwise connecting them. That was somewhere on ET. But don't ask me where. Wayne

No offense. I didn't mean it that way. Wayne

Agekay, Interesting comments and questions! I would absolutely love to discuss those technical issues further and hear more about what you did for graphics and WPF but let's take that off line since it's not on the topic of this thread directly, right? Someone else did point me here as they saw the comments and suggested responding. This was my last post on this thread. Wayne

My point for this thread was just that everyone has indicated the downsides of buying a commercial app, the downsides of using open source software and also the downsides of rolling your own software. Where does that leave you? Allow me to answer without mentioning any specific solution so it's more clear. The answer is an "a la carte" combination of these options. Point is that "roll your own" for any common sense discussion actually means to "cherry pick" components to build your system. To totally roll your own and write every line of code yourself as an individual is nearly unthinkable. For example, if someone rolls their own software, does it make sense to write their own graphics engine with so many commercial and open source ones out there? Does it make sense to write a high speed tick processing engine? Does it make sense to rewrite quantlib or talib, etc. from scratch? Does it make sense to write your own code to communicate with your broker if TradeLink (open source and free) does that already with a easy api? So you see, a la carte, is the way to go if you have the skills to program your own system. As regards your question of "defeating the purpose" of rolling your own, consider this. In the "a la carte" mentality to rolling your own, it seems a smart trader must always analyze the buy versus build versus open source rational for any component. The problem with open source was described above, but don't those same problems exist for rolling your own software only far worse? When you roll your own, you have only yourself to turn to for any assistance if things don't work. And your code won't progress or add features or get bugs fixed unless you do it yourself. So a la carte has enormous advantages since other people are working on, supporting, fixing, improving, the different parts of your system. And you can upgrade any individual part at will. Sorry if I over emphasized a specific components. Hopefully this is more clear as the ideal direction to go if you have the technical ability to "roll your own". Wayne

Good point. It's not only very hard. It's impossible. For example, some people, amazingly, don't like Google search for example. So, software authors must always select their target market or market(s) and focus features on what they request and need. TickZOOM is attracting an interesting lot so far. 3 crowds: do you fit in any of these? 1. Traders who are also programmers are using TickZOOM an loving it since it's the only platform out there right now which has nearly entirely open source code and also a zoom speed testing and trading engine. 2. Discretionary traders who don't know how to program want TickZOOM for its historical testing speed. But at the moment they're stymied by the lack of documentation and have posted tickets to that effect. So we hope to satisfy them eventually and working on that currently. 3. Mid and small size institutions or prop shops who can't afford the 6 figure priced commercial system but have programmers on staff to add anything they need to TickZOOM. Interestingly, as programmers all these people recognize how hard (and sometimes painful) it is to build high speed software with multi-threading, quad core support and other high performance, near real time features. So they're willing to pay for that part of the system. Out of those groups, the programmers already have most of what they need with TickZOOM except more speed options like GPU support and multi symbol support (comming soon). After that, they will be mostly satisfied. So the focus will become building a more elaborate training and GUI for the non-programmers. That is far easier (any body can do it almost) than building the engine. It seems the focus will be more towards teaching the non-programmers who to do things programmatically because it gives far greater options. It's a farce to use a GUI interface to write a strategy--as we all know. Wayne

I went through the same analysis myself before building TickZOOM and was forced to make my own software. The tick filter for bad ticks in one commercial system was terrible and not user replaceable. The performance at tick testing with another was bad ,etc. What made it so difficult was they were closed source. I don't think TickZOOM is the end all solution to this dilemma. However, it solves a specific problem which you can extremely rarely find programmers qualified to solve. That is raw speed in processing tick data to create bars that are updated per tick. TickZOOM zooms through 10million ticks in 40 seconds while updating tick, minute, and hour bars for every tick while updating daily, weekly, monthly, yearly every minute. With streaming technology, it has zero memory constraints. It offers range, volume, change, ticks, point & figure bars, and more completely configurable to use many different time frames simultaneously. It has rolling bar technology and configurable resets for bars. Plus it hungrily seek other ideas for bar types because it would love to support every bar type imaginable.

Thanks. I'm glad to find people who agree that open source isn't always the Panacea that some think it is with many people altruistically contributing code. TickZoom wants to be open source however so that users can see the code and tweak it or otherwise. But the project must generate revenue to keep innovation and provide support moving which is your point, I think. To that end, the solution was to keep only part of the system which provide the ZOOM speed streaming technology for generating bars and firing events as closed source and requiring a low cost license. Interesting. That's how TickZOOM works but it also does what you say below simultaneously--best of both worlds. Like this: TickZOOM has a Windows Service which captures ticks from your data provider or broker and writes them to a file for history. That way, you can start or stop your GUI and do back testing, without missing any ticks. You can even run that data service at a data center for 24/7 reliability. When you want to trade real time, the GUI talks to the data service to get history its missing and the real time feed. Good point.

True. Valid point. TZ is bent on being open source and also generating revenue to solve this issue. Those seem to conflict but a compromise was found that seems to make most users happy. Now, everything is open source in TZ and just switched to LGPL except for the engine that calculates all the bars and fires all the events is closed source. That has all the technology to process ticks at ZOOM speed. Agreed!! As the author of TickZOOM, i can't agree more. I tried all those you mentioned myself. However I'm one of the rare people who is both a successful trader and many year software developer. So I have built TZ ground up to fix the major flaws that I see in other systems as a trader and developer. However, it still lacks some bells and whistles in the GUI. So it's all driven programmatically at present. But that gap will close. Plus, it has been frustruting on other systems that certain features were impossible to control programmatically. On TickZOOM the requirement is that is must be programmatically accessible first, GUI comes second. Also the TradeLink open source project is joining forces to close the gap and that will add support for many more brokers and data feeds. Good point. BTW, the reason I deliver the source code of ZegGraph with TickZOOM is that I have fixed the bugs in ZegGraph itself so it works awesome now with TZ--runs at zoom speed. If you watch the video demo that processes 10million ticks of 5 years of data in 40 seconds, that includes the time to create the chart with ZedGraph. So there's no issues there whatsoever. Also, I built a special feature for real time charting. It centers the last bar on the screen and then let's the bars build across to the right without any scrolling until they get close to the edge. At that point it very smoothly scrolls the current bar back to the center. It also readjusts if the market rallies or sells off such that the price is heading off the screen. It readjusts automatically and smoothly completely hands free. I did that because I liked having channels on the screen which extend 15 or 20 bars forward and wanted to see price filling up the channels and wanted my hands free for trading rather than screen positioning. It's rather sweet. But on the other hand, the only discretionary control is market by or sell through the GUI. Again the GUI is limited for the moment. That IS very cool. I must completely admit. Wow.