From my own experience, it is false economy to rely on free data.  The main problem is the reliability and continuity of the data.  Data is the raw material of trading – if you want to play this game and put your trading money on the line, you need to invest in accurate and reliable data.  Accuracy and reliability costs, and that is why you must pay to get it.

I built a script to read end of day data into a large database and all seemed well.  Then days started to be missed, then eventually the data ceased.  I would have been better off with commercial data, which would have been more timely and reliable.  In addition, I found some data inaccuracies in the free data.  Commercial data suppliers spend a lot of effort to ensure that their price data is accurate.

When you purchase forex data, remember that there is no centralised forex market.  The data you obtain will be different from vendor to vendor. Generally the good vendors spend time and effort on ensuring that the data they provide is as accurate as possible.  This means that it is obtained from multiple sources and processed.

Remember that price data is the lead that your trading system will hopefully turn into gold.  No lead = no gold.  So don’t scrimp on your data and make sure that you have what you need.

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Tags: end of day data, free price data, Price Data, tick data

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 9:10 am and is filed under Trading Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.