Hello Whitney There's been a lot of buzz over the past 3 years about the features of Quotes Plus vs TC2000 and other products so a search in the archives will help you. Here's what I think
One of the few attributes of FT that separates it from Quotes Plus is the 1) quality of the mutual fund data and the 2) amount of work that's been done using a shareware product called TRADE, as well as the community of users who continue to contribute strategies and trading systems based on TRADE. These strategies were based primarily on mutual funds although since Eliot Spitzer's witch-hunt in NY State on mutual fund companies, the strategies are gradually changing to the use of ETFs. There are some folks who are skilled enough in programming AFL that TRADE offers them no advantage. Some gradual progress is being made in converting TRADE strategies to AFL. See a fee paid site called FT-Talk. The mutual fund data in FT is adjusted for distributions and more than one person in the FT organization will spend time manually correcting any missing or incorrect data. Quotes Plus currently responding to errors and oversights in the data but difficult to go back and adjust some of the mutual funds. Unless you're a big user of mutual funds for your investment strategy, and it doesn't sound like you are, I don't think you'd be well served to change from a QP subscription to FT. I use both with the FT data serving as the data source for market signal strategies. For example, what FT won't provide is 1) stock data (with OHLC or volume) 2) fundamental data 3) indices !ID001 to !ID150. Well, it does provide stock data but no one that I know uses it. Also, you might check on this, but if I remember correctly the way the database is organized it only carries the stock Close, no OHL or volume. Worked for mutual funds but not stocks. Best regards Joe BTW...Front running by anyone is BAD, and I applaud Elliott for nailing those guys who were caught doing it. That's not to say I believe they're not doing it anymore, only being more careful. ----- Original Message ----- From: whitneybroach To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 10:24 PM Subject: [amibroker] Fasttrack vs QuotesPlus I am currently using QuotesPlus for stock data and am wondering if I would be better served (in AmiBroker) by switching to Fasttrack? A key need of mine is the ability to maintain breadth measures (with AddToComposite) on the type of issue involved -- such as ETF, bond fund, Optionable -- as well as on the basis of the exchange the issues trade in and their sector / industry. At the moment I can do all of this with the QP data using their daily QP Scans feature, automated in WinXP as a Scheduled Task. Can the same goal be accomplished with Fasttrack? What other comparison/contrast are reasonable between Fasttrack and QuotesPlus? TIA, Whitne
